Casserly entered, followed by the jailer. "Number 3, ain't it?" "Yes." Casserly went straight to this cell, the door of which was open. The prisoner was not within. Casserly called: "Howard!" His voice reverberated from wall to wall, but no answer came. Then was Casserly thoroughly alarmed. Hurriedly and anxiously he ran from one cell to another. All were tenantless. The two men stared at each other, blank astonishment being depicted in their faces. "Where is he?" asked Casserly. "I don't know." "You must know." "Positively I do not." They glanced around upon the walls, and reflected upon the impossibility of scaling their smooth surfaces. Even should this be done, the roof remained, and it was intact. Then did a suspicion, that had been growing in Casserly's breast for the last few moments, take shape; and, with a steady look upon the jailer in a manner that admitted of no trifling or equivocation, he asked, sternly: "Where is that man?" "Upon my honor, I do not know." Casserly nodded. His tone was quiet, but it indicated danger. "Did you leave him in here?" "Yes." "When did you see him last?" "About two hours ago." Casserly again nodded, and asked no more questions. The jailer, stung by the look of sus "A man has just told me that he saw the picion that Casserly did not attempt to conceal, body." "Impossible. But let's go into the Tank, and see." Casserly retraced his footsteps into the courthouse, procured the keys, and returned. Before opening the door of the Tank he asked, as if desirous of leaving no possible room for doubt: said, with great earnestness: "I tell you, Casserly, that I don't know how he left this Tank. It is a terrible mystery." "Doubtless," replied Casserly, calmly. Suddenly Casserly noticed the small door in the south wall of the Tank. This door, like the other, was doubled, having a grating opening inward, and a plate-iron door opening outward. "Did you hear any unusual noise in the They were both closed. He approached closer, Tank?" "I heard him call out once, and would have opened the door, but you had the keys. The voice was very faint, but I'm almost sure I heard it." Casserly swung open the plate-iron door, and looked through the grated door. He saw nothing. Then he inserted his face in a depression made in the grating inward, to allow one a larger perspective. Still he saw nothing. Howard was in his cell, doubtless. As he unlocked the grated door he asked the jailer: "Did you lock him in his cell?" "No." to examine them. He seized the grating, which yielded and swung open. He then pushed upon the solid door, and it opened. He turned upon the jailer, who stood petrified with astonishment, and, with raised voice and glaring eyes, he demanded: "How is this?" The jailer could not reply. He was stifling. Casserly stepped into the yard, followed by the jailer. He saw several footprints on the ground. Following them around the corner of the jail, he found an opening cut through the wooden wall. Sick at heart, Casserly again turned upon the jailer: "How came that door unlocked?" he demanded, angrily. "I don't know." "Where did you keep the key?" "I didn't know there was a key. The door has been locked ever since I took charge, nearly two years ago. I never heard of a key." Casserly turned to leave, without saying another word. He met Judge Simon in the yard. The old man asked, in a deprecating tone: 66 Casserly, how is this?" Casserly merely shook his head. "There is a terrible report on the street about it, Casserly." Casserly's look was inquiring, but his tongue was silent. "I don't believe it, though," continued the old man. "It is too horrible-too unnatural." Casserly's interest was aroused. "What is it?" he asked. "Why, Garratt told me that he saw a woman helping the mob to hang the poor boy." Casserly's look betrayed some surprise. The old man approached closer, and whispered in Casserly's ear: "He said he recognized in that woman"Well?" "-Howard's own mother." Casserly almost staggered under this revelation. His strong nature was shattered. Crushed and humiliated, and almost overpowered by this mountain of mystery that bore him down, he entered the court-house, cheated at every turn, and outwitted like a fool. W. C. MORROW. [CONTINUED IN NEXT NUMBER. ] WRINKLED SIRENS. It is not pleasant, but really lamentable, to acknowledge, first, that sirens have wrinkles; second, that the world is fairly crowded with wrinkled sirens. But the language of facts is incontrovertible; wrinkled sirens exist; there are plenty of them; there is a reason why they exist, and there is a remedy for them. Education, as all the world will admit, ought to have two ends. It ought to develop strength and to supplement weakness-especially with wrinkled sirens. What is good, it ought to make better, and what is wanting, it ought to supply. Some principle of this kind practically obtains in the education of boys; why not with girls? Not only are the strong points of a boy's abili-haps the associations of ideas of what we most ties and character carefully noted, and afforded fair fields of exercise, but his deficiencies also, his stupidity in one or other line of study, his bodily indolence or awkwardness, his cowardly, lying, or cruel propensities-all are noticed by his tutors, and due efforts are made to counteract them. | if you please—their bigotry and superstition, their hastiness and superficialness of judgment, their morbidness of sentiment, their lack of sustained ardor for solid study or abstract thought all these deficiencies are usually left at the end of the most elaborate female education very much as they were in the beginning. It is seemingly taken for granted that, while every defect or wrinkle in man is more or less capable of cure, of being ironed out, in a woman it is hopeless of remedy. Perhaps the cause of this anomaly is a lack of faith in the possibilities of human nature; but I shall not now inquire too deeply into these causes. Per But in the case of girls, only one of these two ends of education is commonly pursued. The peculiar gifts of women, their affectionateness, piety, modesty, and conscientiousness, their quick apprehension, and brilliant intuition, their delicacy of sentiment, and natural love for poetry, music, and all things beautiful-all these qualities are drawn out by the education usually given to them, to the very utmost of the teachers' powers. But the equally ordinary defects of women-their wrinkles, VOL. II.-26. love in woman with so many of woman's weaknesses has endeared the weaknesses themselves, even as some one has said that the silliest custom and wildest belief, which had once been associated with our religion, became dear and venerable in our eyes. In any case, the true faith in womanhood must needs include the conviction that the weaknesses-physical, moral, and intellectual-so often attached to it, cannot truly be an integral part thereof, and that, to relieve it from them, would not be to take aught from its beauty and its charm, but, on the contrary, to increase them. But before following out this line of thought, it is needful to meet, at the outset, an argument which, whether plainly expressed or silently understood, actually bars this whole road of progress in the feelings of thousands. Bun yan's Apollyon no more "straddled all across the way of life" than does this argument the life for women. Briefly, it is this: The end and aim of a woman's life is to be beloved by a man. But men love the weaknesses of a woman rather more than her strength. This fact raises more than half the antagonisms in man to the claim of the ladies struggling for a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It makes men crowd the theater to witness "Miss Multon," or "Hamlet," where Ophelia passes in review, rather than go and listen to Portia. It was the myriad-minded Coleridge who said, "Every man would desire rather to have an Ophelia for a wife than a Portia." "Therefore, it is vain to seek to banish feminine weaknesses, for, by so doing, we are depriving the spider of its thread." To this simple syllogism I have two answers. The first is, that if some men, and even a majority of men, prefer a colorless Ophelia to the rich, brave nature of Portia, yet the one man who prefers Portia is a million times more worthy of love, and more qualified to make a wife happy, than the ninety and nine who prefer Ophelia. Secondly, I am prepared to maintain, that no outward gain whatever is equal in value to the inward gain of a healthy and vigorous frame, a highly trained intellect, a calm reason, a wealthy memory, well ordered passions, and a heart lifted to the love of all things good and holy. Make a comparison between a woman, as a wife, like this, and one ignorant, silly, full of pitiful vanities and ambitions, a prey to her own temper and jealousies, and may a man not parody Solomen's proverb, "Better a solitary life where wisdom is, than a house full of children and folly therewith." More than half the weaknesses of women are the results of that imperfect physical health and vigor, that petite santé, to which their habits commonly consign them from childhood, and which also they inherit from valetudinarian mothers. The other part of these weaknesses appears to be only the natural complements of their best qualities. Of the first of these classes I shall now speak. There is something radically wrong in the present state of things which makes the whole upper class of the female sex-the sex least exposed to toil or disease-very little better than the inmates of a convalescent home. Few ladies are able to do any real work of head or limb for a few days consecutively without breaking down deplorably. The chance of a wetting in a shower, which ought to hurt them no more than it hurts the roses, is a serious source of alarm to their friends. This state of things cannot be remedied in one generation; but it will never be remedied at all by a few fashionable calisthenics. Perhaps the hints I propose, or rather the remedies for wrinkles, may shock many lady readers, but they are remedies which will appeal strongly, if prejudice is not allowed to block up the way of approach. In the first place, the ladies of our best society on the Pacific Coast, like those of New York, London, and Paris, do not go to bed early enough. It should be the habit to retire at half past ten, and this, as a habit, is absolutely invaluable to vigor, freshness, and eyesight. If you do not want this vigor and freshness and clear eyesight, sit up until midnight, and your wish will be gratified. Another typical female defect, and source of wrinkles, is eating too little solid food-eating too much such rubbish as sweets and pickles, hot cakes, pastry, and drinking only water or tea, whereby a healthful appetite is spoiled. Nothing like this will force a woman to the habit of falling back on nervous excitement, for want of natural strength. It would be a great blessing to women if they were more, as men are, sensible of imperious hunger and thirst, and desire for sleep, and less able to draw on their nervous capital when their daily income of strength is exhausted. One of the sad results of society swagger or ostentation is the checking of the appetites of young girls, and causing them to dwindle into what vulgar people consider “genteel" proportions. The remedy for this is to commence at once to treat defective table duty not as a feminine grace, but as a disagreeable, ghoul-like phenomenon. With its many evils and absurdities, it may be questioned whether some pounds of superfluous adipose matter be not, on the whole, a pleasanter burden than a perpetual dyspeptic pain in the side. Naturally, exercise follows here. Nobody wants ladies to train like pugilists, but the truth is that, however good and wholesome exercise may be, its occasional taking can never make a thoroughly healthy woman. It is the whole twentyfour hours which need to be spent healthfully; not one hour of vigorous exercise and ten of sitting in overheated rooms, or walking in thin shoes on cold pavements. Of the two kinds of strength, muscular strength and brain strength, it is the latter which it most concerns our women to obtain. But the training for strength of brain includes a certain, although secondary, degree of muscular training also. What a miserable sight is that of a man of great, perhaps feverish, mental activity, who has accumulated hoards of learning, and is full of generous aspirations, but whose narrow chest, and drooping and rounded shoulders, sunken cheeks, and over-lucent eyes betray that the fleshy pedes tal on which his soul is standing is crumbling beneath him. How almost invariably such a man's thoughts come to us tinctured with sickness; how, in matters of judgment, he is apt to lack ballast, to be carried away by prejudice, to waste moral energy on trifles, to ignore the common principles which determine the action of healthy human nature. We pity these things, and deplore them as exceptional failures when we see them in a man, but when we find them in a woman-much more frequently-why do we not attribute them to the same cause of unequal development of mind and body, and not, as we do, take them for granted as weaknesses inherent in the feminine nature itself. A perfect woman, in the physical sense, is no more crotchety, and credulous, and prejudiced, and vehement about trifles than a well constituted man. Some one has said that the belief in the gloomier doctrines of theology is inseparable from a bad liver. It would be a curious table which gave the proportions between dyspepsia, headaches, tight lacing, and narrow chests, and the belief in certain follies, and the general instability of character and temper which have made women, for ages, the butt of masculine cynicism. Exercise is, no more than food, a thing to be taken and profited by vi et armis. The child who should be compelled every day to swallow a breakfast and a dinner composed of objects disgusting to it, would never be expected by any sane person to thrive thereon. But it is often assumed that the same child will obtain all the benefit of exercise if obliged to walk solemnly up and down a lawn or path for so many hours, or to perform calisthenic exercises in a dull schoolroom. This is an error. Exercise, especially in youth, must be joyous exercise, spontaneously taken, not as a medicine, but with the eagerness of natural appetite. Supreme among all penny-wise and pound-foolish policies, is that which grudges a girl of fourteen a rough pony, or a patch of garden, and lavishes on her, four years afterward, silks and jewels, and all the costly appurtenances of fashionable life. How is it that Harriet Hosmer became the woman of whom America is so proud, England so fond? Because her father taught her to shoot, to ride, before Gibson taught her to model "Sleeping Fawns;" because she possesses physical strength, energy, and joyous animal spirits, faculties that win every prize and charm every heart. Naturally, this topic leads me to that of dress, which is certainly the great stumbling-block in the way of exercise. To advise a lady to dress herself with any serious eccentricity from the prevailing fashion of day and class is to advise | her to incur a penalty which may very probably be the wreck of her whole life's happiness. Men sneer at a woman so dressed, and, perhaps, allow themselves coarse jokes at her expense. But it is only the fault of public opinion that any penalties at all follow innovations, in themselves sensible and modest. To train this public opinion by degrees, to bear with more variations of costume, and especially to insist upon the principle of fitness as the first requisite of beauty, should be the aim of all sensible women. I ask any sensible woman if anything is in worse taste than to wear clothes by which the natural movements are impeded, and purposes, of whatever sort, thwarted. dies laugh at a Chinese woman's foot, and call the practice of making it small very cruel and barbaric, yet it is not one iota more so than wearing long, trailing skirts, when a woman wishes to take a brisk walk, or to run up or down stairs; no more barbaric than to wear bonnets which give no shade to the eyes under a summer sun, or pinching the feet into thin, tight boots, which permit of fatal damp and chill, and cramp the limb into a pitiful little wedge of flesh. Not one Pacific Coast lady's foot in five hundred could be looked at if placed in an antique sandal. La The sooner our women learn that there is no such thing as perfectly idle health, or perfect health without hope, the better. Lives which have no aim beyond the amusement of the hour are inevitably, after the first few years of youth, valetudinarian lives. Women occupy themselves with their own sensations, and quack themselves, and fix their thoughts on one organ or another, until they can bring disease into the soundest part of the body; and all because, four-fifths of the time, they are idle dawdlers. There must be work, and there must be freedom for women, if they are ever to be really healthful beings. If the weaknesses of women, which arise from imperfect bodily health, were removed by better systems of diet and exercise, and hopeful employment maintained for a generation, what weaknesses would remain? I believe there would be few beyond those which may be reckoned as the natural defects or wrinkles, the complementary colors of their special merits. Women are capable of the most intense personal affection; therefore they are liable to neglect abstract principles, and to regard persons too exclusively. Women are tenderhearted and merciful; therefore stern justice and veracity have less than due honor at their hands. Women have brilliant intuitional powers, and think with great rapidity; therefore slow processes of argument are distasteful to them, and their judgments are hasty and often erroneous. All these, and sundry weaknesses besides, are easily explicable. Are they irremediable? Surely not. Men also have defects and wrinkles. They are strong, therefore rough; resolute, therefore cruel; slow of judgment and often stupid; prone to exact justice and vengeance, therefore apt to forget mercy and charity. We do not take it for granted that men cannot become gentle, and nimble-witted, and tender-hearted, because the opposite faults are well nigh natural to them. Still less do we cry out that they will lose some of the charms of their sex, and become effeminate, because they correct their defects or smooth out their wrinkles. To recognize an error is already half way to remedy it; and if the parents, and educators of young girls, will look straight in the face the defects and wrinkles to which they are prone, and, instead of taking them as matters of course, will set about resolutely to remedy them, the victory is secured. It ought to be a very evident truth that, while studies which women most need in order to correct their weak proclivities are commonly denied them, they are, on the other hand, overworked with wretched attempts to acquire a multitude of things rather calculated, than otherwise, to increase their defects. Real art, real music, real painting, real sculpture are magnificent gifts and graces, noble educations for both mind and heart; but the mock-music, mock-drawing, and mock-painting of young ladies to whom the simple groundwork-not to speak of the meaning and grandeur-of their art has never for an instant been revealed, can these be called elements of education? They are elements of nothing but pretentiousness and false taste. I have faith in a coming Arcadia, when our women will expand with a physical and mental beauty hitherto unknown; when they will acknowledge these defects and wrinkles as such, and correctable, and not mere little womanly péchés mignons, that cannot be cured. Meanwhile, it is the duty of all parents, teachers, and writers to set themselves resolutely to the work of that complete education which shall no longer consist merely in making what is good better, but also in changing what is bad and weak into what is good and strong; an education which shall give our girls their just social, moral, mental, and physical power by securing that genial play of natural spirits which is their great, and sometimes their almost mystical, prerogative; and also by fixing them upon solid ground of purity and principle which prevails with the best of our men. Our girls have the future of American society in their hands, and they need all that belongs to them to keep and to exalt their powers. BOYNTON Carlisle. A GRASS-WIDOW.-SHE TELLS HER OWN STORY. Dear Liz:-I have just read your letter. I larf, I do. I larf good. Oh, what a girl you are! Bound for glory through the medium of a yellow cover, are you? Well, sail in; I shall never overtake you, because I am not traveling in that direction. Do you know, Liz (you invited my confidence), that I am the biggest fool outside of Bedlam? A motley fool, as Shakspere says; a durned, complicated fool, as Sut Lovengood expresses it; a piebald, pinto, Dolly Varden, and measly fool. Put all these adjectives in, and even then you will hardly get the true inwardness of my idiocy. And what do you think I've been, and gone, and done? But I won't tell you just yet. I want to give you some idea of my physical state, hoping it may palliate the absurdity of the rest of me. You know the physical is the foundation of the mental and moral, and if it gets into a shilly-shally, slip-shod, weak-kneed condition, the whole su perstructure begins to wiggle and lean. I know I am not well. It don't agree with me to be shut up within four brick walls, where the sun never shines, and I have turned pale, and my hands and feet are always cold. Therefore, I have lost my attitude of proud (?) independence, and find myself in a leaning posture, You can fill in the space with the simile of the vine yourself. And so—I wonder if I had better confess my weakness, or squnch up this piece of paper, and throw it in the waste-basket. No, I'll tell you, if it bursts my corset -lace. I might as well come to the point at once. I have fallen in love. The cat is out of the bag at last, and a wretched looking specimen it is. Now, if my "sweetness" would only make love to me after the fashion of the average male creature, I should be cured of my infatuation in a week. But here is a sort of double, |