Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/192

176 electrified by the wail of a "Rachel mourning for her children." "O father! she's my child! she's my child!" I reached the door, which was guarded by the sheriff, in a condition of mental exaltation (or concentration), which to this day reflects itself at the recollection of that agonizing cry of the beautiful young mother, set upon by the myrmidons of the law whose base inhumanity shames the brute! "Who is it?" "What is it?" "What does it all mean?" were the anxious queries put up on all sides. I answered: "It means, my friends, that a woman has no legal right to her own babies; that the law-makers of this Christian country (!) have given the custody of the babies to the father, drunken or sober, and he may send the sheriff — as in this case — to arrest and rob her of her little ones! You have heard sneers at 'Woman's Rights.' This is one of the rights — a mother's right to the care and custody of her helpless little ones!"

From that excited crowd — all young men and grown boys, I being the only woman among them — rose thick and fast — "''They've no business with the woman's babies!" "Pitch 'em overboard!" "I'll help." "Good for you; so'll I!" "All aboard.''" (The conductor had come upon the scene). "All aboard." "Wait a minute till he gets the other child," cries the old man, rushing out of the saloon with a little three-year-old girl in his arms, while the sheriff rushed in. Standing behind the old man, I beckoned to the conductor, who knew me, to "go on," and in five minutes we were across the Massachusetts line, and I was in the saloon. With his hand on her child, the sheriff was urging the mother to let go her hold. "Hold on to your baby," I cried, "he has no right, to take it from you, and is liable to fine and imprisonment for attempting it. Tell me, Mr. C, are you helping the other party as a favor, or in your official capacity? In the latter case you might have taken her child in Vermont, but we are in Massachusetts now, quite out of your sheriff's beat." 'The grandfather made legal custodian by the father, was he? That would do in Vermont, sir, but under the recent decision of a Massachusetts Court, given in a case like this, only the father can take the child from its mother, and in attempting it you have made yourselves liable to fine and imprisonment." Thus the "sheriffalty" was extinguished, and mother and child took their seat beside me in the car.

Meantime the conductor had made the old gentleman understand that they could get off at the next station, where they might take the "up train," and get back to their "team" on the Vermont side of the "line." As they could get no carriage at the bare little