Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/288

254 The hours of anxious waiting were not long, the verdict soon came flashing on every wire, from the north, the south, the west: "No!" "No!" "No!" The mothers, wives and daughters of Nebraska must still wear the yoke of slavery; they who endured with man the hardships of the early days and bravely met the dangers of a pioneer life, they who have reared two generations of boys and taught them the elements of all they know, who have stood foremost in all good works of charity and reform, who appreciate the genius of free institutions, native-born American citizens, are still to be governed by the ignorant, vicious classes from the old world. What a verdict was this for one of the youngest States in the American republic in the nineteenth century!

But these heroic women did not sit down in sackcloth and ashes to weep over the cruel verdict. Anticipating victory, they had engaged the Opera House to hold their jubilee if the women of Nebraska were enfranchised; or, if the returns brought them no cause for rejoicing, they would at least exalt the educational work that had been done in the State, and dedicate themselves anew to this struggle for liberty. They had survived three defeats, in Kansas, Michigan, Colorado, and tasted the bitterness of repeated disappointments, and another could not crush them. When the hour arrived, an immense audience welcomed them in the Opera House, and from this new baptism of sorrow they spoke more eloquently than ever before. In their calm, determined manner they seemed to say with Milton's hero:

 "All is not lost: the unconquerable will is ours."

A report of the Fifteenth Annual Washington Convention, Jan. 23, 24, 25, 1883, was written by Miss Jessie Waite of Chicago, and published in the Washington Chronicle, from which we give the following extracts:

The proceedings of the Association were inaugurated at Lincoln Hall Monday evening by a novel lecture, entitled "Zekle's Wife," by Mrs. Amy Talbot Dunn of Indianapolis. The personality of Mrs. Dunn is so entirely lost in that of Zekle's wife that it is hard to realize that the old lady of so many and so varied experiences is a happy young wife. As a character sketch Mrs. Dunn's "Zekle's Wife" stands on an equality with Denman Thompson's "Joshua Whitcomb" and with Joe Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle." To sustain a conception so foreign to the natural characteristics of the actor without once allowing the interest of the audience to flag, requires originality of thought, independence of idea, and genius for action. Mrs. Dunn, herself the author of her sketch, possesses to a re-