Let the cattle, and the countless
thousands of stock, prodded into cars and cramped in long passages of
transit, blinded with the crash of fellow-victims' horns while crowded
together in their inadequate quarters, trampled under riotous hoofs,
and kept without food and overfilled with water to make them look fat,
go on a strike. Let the chickens and geese and all the live feathered
stock on South Water Street, kept in little bits of coops and flung
headlong and screaming down into dark cellars, trundled over rough
roads in jolting wagons and utterly deprived for hours at a time of a
drop of water to cool the fever of their terrible fear, go on a strike.
Let the horses of these fat aldermen, left all day in the court house
alleyway without food and checked tight with head-check lines, go on a
strike. Let the patient nags that stand all day by the curbstone and
are plagued and annoyed by mischievous boys, go on a strike. In such a
strike as any of these the Lord himself might condescend to take sides
with the oppressed against the oppressor.
LI.
A MANNISH WOMAN.
There are many disagreeable things to be met with in life, but none
that is much harder upon the nerves than a mannish woman. With a
strident voice and a swaggering walk, and a clattering tongue, she
takes her course through the world like a cat-bird through an orchard;
the thrushes and the robins are driven right and left before the
advance of the noisy nuisance.
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