p her shawl in her hand with
a seeming careless movement, and let it drop lightly across her knee,
where the gold threads in the embroidery caught the light; and she took
off her hat, which she had thought proper to wear to show her sense that
the Meeting was not an evening party; and prepared herself to listen.
Her complexion and her hair, and the gold threads in the rich Indian
work, thus blazed out together upon the startled audience. Many of them
were as much struck by this as by the beginning of Mr. Northcote's
speech, though it was very different from the other speeches. The others
had been routine agitation, this was fiery conviction, crude, and
jumping at conclusions, but still an enthusiasm in its way. Mr.
Northcote approached his subject gradually, and his hearers, at first
disappointed by the absence of their familiar watch-words, were dull,
and bestowed their attention on Phoebe; but before he had been speaking
ten minutes Phoebe was forgotten even by her uncle and aunt, the two
people most interested in her. It would be dangerous to repeat to a
reader, probably quite uninterested in the controversy, Mr. Northcote's
speech, in which he laid hold of some of those weak points which the
Church, of course, has in common with every other institution in the
world. Eloquence has a way of evaporating in print, even when the report
is immediate. But his peroration was one which startled his hearers out
of a calm abstract interest to all that keen personal feeling which
accompanies the narrative of facts known to an audience, and affecting
people within their own locality.

"I have only been in this place three days," said the speaker, "but in
that short time I have heard of one of the most flagrant abuses which I
have been indicating to you. There is in this town, as you all know, an
institution called the College; what was its original object I do not
know. Nests of idle pauperism, genteelly veiled under such a name, do
exist, I know, over all the country; but it is at least probable that
some educational purpose was in the mind of the pious founder who
established it. The pious founder! how immense are the revenues, how
incalculable the means of doing good, which have been locked up in
uselessness, or worse than uselessness, by men who have purchased a pass
into the kingdom of heaven at the last moment by such gifts, and become
pious founders just before they ceased to be miserable sinners! Whatever
may have been t