“Good old Fortnightly,” I apostrophise mentally. “Long life and prosperity be thine,” and I am confidently able to predict that there will be a persistent and flourishing Fortnightly Review of all things British long after the Nineteenth Century has become a thing of the past.
But here my attention is directed to the fact that two women, who have always womanfully championed the cause of their sex, have written replies to the anti-woman suffrage article, and that, furthermore, the editor of the Nineteenth Century has inserted these replies in his review, which forthwith is absolved from a great share of the displeasure which the “atrocity” roused, not alone in my breast, but in thousands of other women—and MEN.
The last fact is justly emphasised in big letters, for it shows that at least some portion of the male sex recognises the enormity and injustice of saddling one-half of the human race with all the disabilities it is possible to heap upon it, except the disabilities of exemption from taxation and kindred methods of assisting in promoting the general welfare of the nation.
When I mention the fact that the two replies in the Nineteenth are written by Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Ashton Dilke respectively, I have, I think, given sufficient assurance that the replies are in themselves able ones.
Into such a good humour, in fact, have I been soothed by the perusal of the counter-protests, that I find myself stringing together all sorts of fancies in which women’s achievements form conspicuous features, and I am just noticing how pleasant Mrs. Weldon looks in the Speaker’s chair, listening to Mrs. Besant’s first Prime Ministerial speech, when my senses become entirely “obfuscated,” as Sambo would say, and I sink into slumber as profound as that which overcame the fabled enchanted guardians of my favourite enchanted palace.
CHAPTER I.
The next event I can chronicle was opening my eyes on a scene at once so beautiful and strange that I started to my feet in amaze. This was not my study, and I beheld nothing of the magazine which was the last thing I remembered seeing before I went to sleep. I was in a glorious garden, gay with brilliant hued flowers, the fragrance of which filled the air with a subtle and delicate perfume; around me were trees laden with luscious fruits which I can only compare to apples, pears, and quinces, only they were as much finer than the fruits I had hitherto been familiar with as Ribstone pippins are to crabs, and as jargonelles are to greenbacks. Countless birds were singing overhead, and I was about to sink down again, and yield to a delicious languor which overpowered me, when I was recalled to the necessity of behaving more decorously by hearing someone near me exclaim in mystified accents, “By Jove! But isn’t this extraordinary? I say, do you live here, or have you been taking hasheesh too?”
I looked up, and saw, perched on the limb of a great tree, a young man of about thirty years of age, who looked so ridiculously mystified at the elevated position in which he found himself, that I could not refrain from smiling, though I did not feel able to give an immediate satisfactory reply to his queries.
“Oh, that’s right,” he commented. “It makes a fellow relieved to see a smile, when he wasn’t at all sure whether he wouldn’t get sent to Jericho for perching up an apple tree. But really, I don’t know how the deuce I came to be up here, that is, I beg your pardon, but I can’t understand how I happen to be up this apple tree. And oh! by Jove! It isn’t an apple tree, after all! Isn’t it extraordinary?”