THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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ginia, is famed for its embroidery. We hope it will not be deemed unbecoming to advert to the fact that wherever a Virginia woman is at work, her personality is marked. There is an indefinable charm about her gentle voice, cordial manners and frankness that is better felt than described. Untrue she is to her rearing, if the love- light is not in her eye, and if “ the law of kindness is not the law of her lips.”

Virginia hospitality has become proverbial, and it goes without saying, that this quality, in its practical bearings, emanates mainly from the housekeeping branch of the family. The increased burden entailed upon a family by the presence of guests must be borne by the female members, and, therefore, where strangers are cordially wel­comed to a seat at the family board, depend upon it, it is the mistress who deserves the praise. Her large heart and loving sympathy with her fellow-creatures makes every burden borne on their behalf seem light, and sweetens even domestic drudgery. Thank God Virginia women still delight to honor the precept: “ Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,” although this can not be done nowadays without personal exer­tion. All New York recently laughed over the characteristic simplicity of a typical old Virginian, whom at the great naval review chance threw near enough to Sir John Hopkins, commander of the British fleet, to admit of speech. Impressed by the admiral’s appearance, and full of the enthusiasm of the hour, he rushed up to him, saying: “Sir, are you a foreigner?” “I am an Englishman,” was the cold reply. “ Well,” exclaimed the stranger, “I live in Fauquier County, Virginia, and if you ever come there, come to my house and I shall be delighted to see you.”

We may be sure that would-be entertainer of the Nation’s guest had a helpmate at home upon whom he could rely, should the stranger appear at her husband’s behest, to be ready to greet him with smiling face and open for him the best guest- chamber, with its high post bedstead, dimity curtains, and lavender-scented linen.

Conservatism everybody admits to be an attribute peculiarly cherished in Vir­ginia, yet more if possible by the women than by the men. The reason for any change must be well proved before being adopted by a Virginian of either sex. Local attach­ments are very strong in them, and doubtless this is one of the elements that enters into the glowing patriotism that is apt to inspire the breast of everyone reared within that widely diversified but homogeneous district, ycleped Virginia. And yet, what bundles of contradiction we are. The same being at whose knee her sons drink in large draughts the love of country has been bred in the belief that it is a shame for a woman to intermeddle with politics, and to feel as if it were presumptuous in her to talk of public affairs. The domestic circle has ever been believed in Virginia to be pre-eminently woman’s province. In the jealousy with which the people there guard its privacy and sacredness they prove their English lineage.

The sanctity of the marriage relation is regarded with a primeval simplicity. It is a land of happy marriages, large families, and loving bands of brothers and sisters. Women smile when they are asked if they favor women’s rights, so live they to bless and be blessed in the sunshine of domestic happiness, that if there be a yoke upon them they are perfectly unconscious of its existence; or, can it be that the yoke is so softly lined with the velvet of courtesy and mutual respect, devotion and self- sacrifice, that its pressure can never gall. Let Virginia women long rest in their happy contentment, blind to any wrongs to be righted in the nature of their own lot.

To the generation now extant has not fallen the stimulus of the heroic epoch that just preceded this. Upon them has blown the cold, biting winds of poverty, a reduction in circumstances and narrowing of the horizon that is all the harder to struggle against because its trials are of a petty, every-day sort, and if overcome and transmuted into blessings, the victory is of that quiet, unobtrusive kind, which elicits no praise and awakens no enthusiasm.

Here again we notice an apparent inconsistency. These same conservative, con­tented, and domestic women are indomitable in their enterprise. They imbibe, by intuition, it seems, the ideas of the age in which they live, and ten to one they are in the van of every movement for the advancement of their sex, holding back, though at all times they seem yet in the car of progress, driven by the spirit of the period.