ns
concerning this unintelligible answer, and, after leaving her name,
returned again at three o'clock. She had the good fortune to be
admitted, and found her friend at her chocolate. She had a dish of
this in one hand, and with the other she seemed to have been busy in
sorting a large pile of guineas, which she had divided in two heaps
on the table before her. Rising, she greeted her visitor with great
civility, and expressed regret at the latter's disappointment on first
calling, saying, with a smile, that when her friend had been a little
longer in town, she would lie longer in bed in the morning. She then
enlightened her as to the term "racquet," telling her that when the
number assembled for cards exceeded ten tables the game was so styled;
if fewer, it was called a "rout"; and if there were but two tables, it
was a "drum."

It must always appear a curious and an unfortunate circumstance that
at the time of the great industrial awakening in England in the last
half of the eighteenth century, when men, women, and children were
losing their individuality and becoming mere industrial units,
representing so many pounds of human energy to be added to a machine,
the women and children of the factories and of the hovels of the
factory towns cried piteously to the Church for bread and received but
a stone. And this was at a time when the social needs were so great
and the sympathies of all other classes seemed to be alienated by
diversity of interest from those who were called upon to toil for the
making of England's wealth. Professor Thorold Rogers, the painstaking
and acute investigator of England's industry, says with regard to
the lethargy which constituted a veritable Dark Age for the English
Church: "It is hard indeed to see what there is to relieve the
darkness of the picture which the Anglican Church presents from the
death of Queen Anne to the time of the Evangelical Revival. Over
against the Anglican Church, formal, jealous of laymen, fearful of
schism or irregularity, should be set the nonconformist churches."
Although there was a great deal of religious enthusiasm in the
religious communities of the Commonwealth, the principal branches of
the Protestant nonconformists soon became wedded to their own systems,
and, in a way, as narrow in their application of the principles of the
New Testament as the church from which they had separated. It was
not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that a movemen