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They receive twenty newspapers of different kinds; and they are Spiritualists. The buildings at Pleasant Hill are remarkably good. The dwellings have high ceilings, and large, airy rooms, well fitted and very comfortably furnished, as are most of the Shaker houses. Most of the buildings are of stone or brick, and the stone houses in particular are well built.
"Oh, do, Mardie!" cried Sue, crossing her feet, folding her hands, and looking up into her mother's face expectantly. "Once there was a very good Shaker named Elder Calvin Green, and some one wrote him a letter asking him to come a long distance and found a Settlement in the western part of New York State.
As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed, however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession. I went one evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the angelic life.
He had thought of her at last! An odd, mysterious smile flickered on her lips. With a sudden convulsive movement she drew the long shaker cloak closer about her shoulders. "Tom, there is a little park over there, with benches. Let us sit down for a moment." "You won't do it, Mary, will you?" he pleaded, now completely in the grip of that terrible dread.
Just you go right up and knock at that 'ere door." I knocked. In a twinkling the door was opened by a neat Shaker sister, whose round, smiling face was flushed, as though she had just come from cooking dinner. I stepped across the threshold: "Bessie Stewart is here. Please say to her that a friend a friend from England wishes to see her."
But I did hear," hesitating a moment, "as how Bessie Stewart was away to Shaker Village; and some does say" a portentous pause and clearing of her throat "that she's jined." "Joined what?" I asked, all in a mist of impatience and perplexity. "Jined the Shakers." "Nonsense!" I said, recovering my breath angrily. "Where is this Hiram's wife? Let me see her."
"Yea, Miriam, and daily bread for some other little mouths, if God send them," observed the simple Shaker lad. Miriam did not reply, but looked down into the spring, where she encountered the image of her own pretty face, blushing within the prim little bonnet. The third pilgrim now took up the conversation.
I kept my own counsel as I turned over the watch to Hiram, but a suspicion shot through me that perhaps that wagon had gone by, after all, in the moment that I had been off guard. Hiram kept the watch faithfully till five that morning, when I too was stirring. One or two teams had passed, but no Shaker wagon rattling through the night. We breakfasted in the little room that overlooked the road.
And the Shaker of the earth, with his trident in his hands, was himself the leader, and sent forth into the waves all the foundations of beams and stones that the Achaians had laid with toil, and made all smooth by the strong current of the Hellespont, and covered again the great beach with sand, when he had swept away the wall, and turned the rivers back to flow in their channel, where of old they poured down their fair flow of water.
The ancient theory of wives in multiples is giving place to the modern practice of wives in series. The story is told that a dear Shaker brother once fell from grace and disappeared in the maelstrom of the carnal world; in a few years he came back as penitent as he was penniless, with strange accounts of how men had fleeced him of all he possessed save the clothes none too desirable on his back.
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