strong tax-carts; and others, generally the young,
proceeding on foot over fields and through woods, to these meetings.
They were truly an old-world race, clad in very old-world garments.
Arrived at their meeting, they sate generally an hour and three quarters
in profound silence, for none of them had a minister in them, and then
returned again. In winter they generally had a good fire in a chamber,
and sate comfortably round it.

Once a month, they jogged off in similar style to one of these meetings
in particular, to what they called their monthly meeting, where they
paid in their subscriptions for the poor, and other needs of the
society, and read over and made answers to a set of queries on the moral
and religious state of their meetings. One would have thought that this
business must be so very small that it would be readily despatched; but
not so. Small enough, Heaven knows! it was; but then they made a
religious duty of its transaction, and went through it as solemnly and
deliberately as if the very salvation of the kingdom depended on it. O,
what a mighty balancing of straws was there! In answering the query,
whether their meetings were pretty regularly kept up and attended,
though perhaps there was but half a dozen members to one meeting, yet
would it be weighed and weighed again whether the phrase should be, that
it was "pretty well attended," or "indifferently attended," or
"attended, with some exceptions." This stupendous business having,
however, at length been got through, then all the men adjourned to the
room where the women had, for the time, been just as laboriously and
gravely engaged; and a table was soon spread by a person agreed with,
with a good substantial dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding; and the
good people grew right sociable, chatty, and even merry in their way;
while, all the time in the adjoining stable, or, as in one case, in the
stable under them, their steeds, often rough, wild creatures, thrust
perhaps twenty into a stable without dividing stalls, were kicking,
squealing, and rioting in a manner that obliged some of the good people
occasionally to rise from their dinners, and endeavor to diffuse a
little of their own quietness among them. Or in summer their horses
would be all loose in the graveyard before the meeting, rearing,
kicking, and screaming in a most furious manner; which, however, only
rarely seemed to disturb the meditations of their masters and
mistresses.

And to th