This text is part of:
[188]
to another; finally, on a sudden impulse, she struck the opening chords of the Russian National Hymn.
Mme. Breschkovskaya started forward.
“Ah, madame!”
she cried, “do not play that!
You cannot know what that air means to us Russians!”
At a great meeting in Faneuil Hall the two spoke, in English and Russian respectively, while other addresses were in Yiddish and Polish.
All were frantically applauded by the polyglot audience which filled the hall to overflowing.
William Dudley Foulke presided at this meeting.
Speaking with our mother several years later, he reminded her of the occasion, which he thought might have been of a somewhat anarchistic tendency.
He was not sure, he said, that they had not made fools of themselves.
“One can afford,” she replied, “to make a very great fool of one's self in such a cause as that of Russian liberty”
The year 1891 saw the birth of another society in which she was deeply interested, the Women's Rest Tour Association, whose object was “simply to make it easier for women who need a trip abroad to take one.”
It was proved “that the sum of $250 was sufficient to enable a woman of simple tastes to enjoy a summer's vacation in Europe” ; a travelling fund was established from which women could borrow, or — in certain cases -receive gifts; a handbook was issued, etc., etc.
In an unobtrusive way, the Women's Rest Tour Association did and continues to do much good.
She was its president to the close of her life, and in silent
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.