to let the horse have his head and pick his
way as best suited him. Our pace never
altered until, glimmering through the
wood, the lights of our log-house became
visible, and then, with a wild hurrah to
announce our coming, the horses were
urged to their maddest speed, and we
swept out from the dark forest background
like so many phantom riders.

Another glorious dinner, another turbulent
night, and a day's duck and snipe
shooting, brought our Nimrodic entertainment
to an end, and the following morning
saw us on our way back to Charleston.
The venison that had fallen to my gun was
equally divided between the officers of the
Petrel and myself, my portion being intended
as a present to our consul, with
whom, indeed, we were to dine that evening,
he having most considerately waved all
questions of costume, and bid us to his table
in our travelling roughness.

MARRIED WOMEN'S PROPERTY.

OF all the subjects on which nonsense
can be talked, or written, there is, perhaps,
none more fertile in absurdities than
the everlasting controversy on the endless
question of the "subjection of women."
Whether women are to vote, to sit in
parliament, to be doctors, lawyers, and clerks,
as the one party hotly contends they
should be, or whether are they to confine
their attention exclusively to the smaller
details of domestic life, as the other side
with equal vehemence insists, are questions
on which debate never ceases. And the
point is argued with an amount of acrimony,
a shrillness of invective, and a
general loss of temper, quite amazing to
contemplate. It is no part of our present
purpose to say anything on the points at
issue between the contending parties. It
may be that there is a good deal to be said
on both sides—a good deal, at all events,
is said on both sides. We do not propose
to disturb the mass of false argument,
of stale claptrap, and of stolid bigotry
under which the subject has been buried
by a long succession of controversial
sextons. But there is one reform, one
road to a real emancipation of women,
which stands some chance of being
overlooked in the heat and turmoil of the main
fight, to which we are anxious to call the
attention of all the combatants. Of the
upholders of what may be called the
domestic theory, for the reason that there
is nothing in the proposed change in any
great degree hostile to their views, and of
the red-hot emancipators, because, without
it, no part of the revolution for which
they long, can ever be successfully carried
out. It is of no use to open to women more
extended fields for work and for earning
money, so long as large numbers of them
are deprived of any control over their own
earnings. Until married women's property
is protected by the same laws that
protect the property of the rest of her
Majesty's subjects, it is idle to talk of the
emancipation of women.

At the present time, a married woman,
so far as the possession of property is
concerned, is, in the eye of the law, simply a
non-existent personage. At common law
there is but one person in a matrimonial
partnership, and that person is the husband.
Under this singular system, a wife, on her
marriage, is supposed to make her husband
an absolute gift of all her personal
property. He may do what he likes with it,
and she has no sort of claim upon it from
the moment of the marriage. If she be
fortunate enough to be possessed of real
estate as a spinster, it will avail her little
in her changed condition. The husband
is entitled to receive the rents and profits
of the wife's estates, and to spend them as
he pleases. There is, obviously, a little
mistake in the marriage service somewhere.
It is, in fact, the wife who endows her
husband with all her worldly goods. It is
true that the husband professes to endow
the wife, but that is nothing but a pleasant
fiction, a merry little jest. This irresponsible
power which the man enjoys over the
woman's property, applies not only to such
property as she may have brought with her
at her marriage, but to anything and everything
she may acquire afterwards. The
wife, being a nobody in law, is incapable of
entering into a contract, she cannot sue or
be sued, and is, consequently, quite unable
legally to earn anything whatever. If she
work for wages, the wages are her
husband's. If she write a book, she has
nothing to do with the profits. If she paint
a picture, the price of it is not her own.
And here is one of the most fertile sources
of hardship; here is the tyranny of man,
of which we hear so much, unmistakable
for once. The bad husbands, there is no
doubt, have it all their own way.

The Courts of Equity have, no doubt,
provided a certain sort of remedy for some
of the evils resulting from this system. A
woman may, if she happen to know that