epper-and-salt shawl, black rigolette, and all,
when she finished this unprecedented speech; and when he went to sleep
that night in the old north chamber, the one he and Louisa had been born
in, the one his father and mother had died in, it was with a little
smile of hope on his lips.

"Set her place at hearth and board
As it used to be!"

These were the last words that crossed his waking thoughts.

Before Louisa went to her own bed, she wrote one of her brief and
characteristic epistles to Susanna, but it did not reach her, for the
"hills of home" had called John's wife so insistently on that Sunday,
that the next day found her on her way back to Farnham.

DEAR SUSANNA [so the letter read],--There's a new man in your house
at Farnham. His name is John Hathaway, but he's made all over and
it was high time. _I_ say it's the hand of God! He won't own up
that it is, but I'm letting him alone, for I've done quarreling,
though I don't like to see a man get religion and deny it, for all
the world like Peter in the New Testament. If you haven't used up
the last one of your seventy-times-sevens, I think you'd better
come back and forgive your husband. If you don't, you'd better send
for your son. I'm willing to bear the burdens the Lord intends
specially _for_ me, but Jack belongs to you, and a good-sized heavy
burden he is, too, for his age. I can't deny that, if he _is_ a
Hathaway. I think he's the kind of a boy that ought to be put in a
barrel and fed through the bung-hole till he grows up; but of
course I'm not used to children's ways.

Be as easy with John at first as you can. I know you'll say _I_
never was with _my_ husband, but he was different. He got to like
a bracing treatment, Adlai did. Many's the time he said to me,
"Louisa, when you make up our minds, I'm always contented." But
John isn't made that way. He's a changed man; now, what we've got
to do is to _keep_ him changed. He doesn't bear you any grudge for
leaving him, so he won't reproach you.

Hoping to see you before long, I am,

Yours as usual,

LOUISA BANKS.

XI

"THE OPEN DOOR"

[Illustration]

On the Saturday evening before the yearly Day of Sacrifice the spiritual
heads of each Shaker family call upon all the Believers to enter
heartily next day into the humiliations and blessings of open
confession.