never seen
their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them. At
the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree,
which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade
(with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely
opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the
sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying
his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.

I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath
solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended
Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few
disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's
breath among the leaves of the birch-tree. No other speech of man has
ever moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful--a
positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts
should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three,
when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them; and
Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.
After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would descend from
his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full length on the
ground, face downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics
as were suggested by the discourse.

Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities
of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the
first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down
from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion,
nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women,
and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and
with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.

"It shall not always be so!" cried she. "If I live another year, I
will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"

She perhaps saw me smile.

"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"
exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes. "That smile,
permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and
shallow thought. It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there
will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquen