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THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
three-acre patch. We read of a vote of thanks to Mrs. Allie Hervy Ballard, who brought the refining influence of music into the Lexington public schools, where it has flourished for three years. Miss Elizabeth Harrison, of Kentucky, started your Chicago Kindergarten Training School, now a college, in 1885. In our literary exhibit on these grounds is a pamphlet upon the life of Mrs. Julia A. Tevis, the pioneer teacher at Science Hill, Shelbyville, which school she carried on for mor^ than sixty years; the gifted woman who, just three years after Susan Taylor’s ambitious essay in 1822, opened her school with a chemical laboratory in the building, and applied to its mysteries the female intellect. This literary exhibit contains also volumes in prose and poetry from Rosa Vertner Jeffrey, a brilliant writer, a woman of great beauty and a social leader, whose pen has wielded infinite power. Other writers on the list are Sarah Bryan Piatt, Catherine A. Warfield, Amelia B. Welby, Eliza R. Parker, Alice Hawthorne Mudd, Nellie Marshall McAfee, Annie Chambers Ketchum, Ida Goldsmith Morris, Elvira Sydnor Miller, Nellie Talbot Kinkead, Pdorence Griffith Miller, Sophie Pox Sea, Ida Withers Harrison and a hundred more who, from the sheltered sanctum, have moved the souls and molded the sentiment of mankind.
Did time permit, I might tell you of our marvelous needle-women, our societies of church and charity workers, our “ King’s Daughters;” our missionaries, led by that human saint, Sybil Carter; our farmers, with Miss Hannah Bürgin in the van; our elocutionists, all honor to Mrs. Bessie Miller Oton; our kindergartens, with the pioneer Mrs. S. S. Higgins and Miss Sallie Adams in the field; our physicians, our journalists and lecturers. I should tell you how the crowd of curious auditors flocked to hear Mrs. Lula Adams Nield, the first W. C. T. U. speaker in the region; how her modest and quiet voice left no room for frivolous comment. How the white ribbons fluttered everywhere to the rally of Mrs. Frances E. Beauchamp. Your president, Mrs. Potter Palmer, whose energy and tact, whose wisdom and philanthropy, made the Woman’s Building possible, is a Kentucky woman; your chairman, Mrs. James P. Eagle, who has presided here with such winning grace and marked intelligence, is a Kentucky woman. These need no comment; I could not add to their fame. But a volume would scarce hold them all. We have no wish to be manlike. We care not to lose our right of pleasing. We do not ask liberty of our individuality. Fathers and brothers are helping us, and husbands do not all hold back. Society looks kindly on, and the rich girl and the poor girl walk side by side where only dollars and cents constitute the distinction between. And when voice and pen and brain and hand shall have filled our boundaries with enlightened views, with the education of the masses, with happiness at the fireside and with universal respect, then only shall it be said of Kentucky women, “They have done what they could.” Then only may we fold our draperies about us in a painless sleep, and smilingly say—
“ My old Kentucky home, good-night.”