nds and feet
are quick to serve, your face is turned toward the truth, and your heart
is all ready to receive the revelation."

"I wish I need n't turn my back on one set of duties to take up
another," murmured Susanna, timidly.

"Yee; no doubt you do. Your business is to find out which are the higher
duties, and then do those. Just make up your mind whether you'd rather
replenish earth, as you've been doing, or replenish heaven, as we're
trying to do. But I must go to my work; ten o'clock in the morning's
a poor time to be discussing doctrine! You're for weeding, Susanna, I
suppose?"

Brother Ansel was seated at a grindstone under the apple trees, teaching
(intermittently) a couple of boys to grind a scythe, when Susanna came
to her work in the herb-garden, Sue walking discreetly at her heels.

Ansel was a slow-moving, humorously-inclined, easygoing Brother, who was
drifting into the kingdom of heaven without any special effort on his
part.

"I'd 'bout as lives be a Shaker as anything else," had been his rather
dubious statement of faith when he requested admittance into the band
of Believers. "No more crosses, accordin' to my notion, an' consid'able
more chance o' crowns!"

His experience of life "on the Adamic plane," the holy estate of
matrimony, being the chief sin of this way of thought, had disposed
him to regard woman as an apparently necessary, but not especially
desirable, being. The theory of holding property in common had no
terrors for him. He was generous, unambitious, frugal-minded, somewhat
lacking in energy, and just as actively interested in his brother's
welfare as in his own, which is perhaps not saying much. Shakerism was
to him not a craving of the spirit, not a longing of the soul, but a
simple, prudent theory of existence, lessening the various risks that
man is exposed to in his journey through this vale of tears.

"Womenfolks makes splendid Shakers," he was wont to say. "They're all
right as Sisters, 'cause their belief makes 'em safe. It kind o' shears
'em o' their strength; tames their sperits; takes the sting out of 'em
an' keeps 'em from bein' sassy an' domineerin'. Jest as long as they
think marriage is right, they'll marry ye spite of anything ye can do or
say--four of 'em married my father one after another, though he fit 'em
off as hard as he knew how. But if ye can once get the faith o' Mother
Ann into 'em, they're as good afterwards as they was wicked afore.
There's no stoppi