s much of God as another, has led the children of
gentle dove-colored mothers to appear in shades of rose-color, blue, and
lilac; and wise elders have said, it is not so much the color or the
shape that we object to, as giving too much time and too much money,--if
the heart is right with God and man, the bonnet ribbon may be of any
shade you please."

"But don't you think," said Pheasant, "that a certain fixed dress,
marking the unworldly character of a religious order, is desirable? Now,
I have said before that I am very fond of dress. I have a passion for
beauty and completeness in it; and as long as I am in the world and
obliged to dress as the world does, it constantly haunts me, and tempts
me to give more time, more thought, more money, to these things than I
really think they are worth. But I can conceive of giving up this thing
altogether as being much easier than regulating it to the precise point.
I never read of a nun's taking the veil, without a certain thrill of
sympathy. To cut off one's hair, to take off and cast from her, one by
one, all one's trinkets and jewels, to lie down and have the pall thrown
over one, and feel one's self, once for all, dead to the world,--I
cannot help feeling as if this were real, thorough, noble renunciation,
and as if one might rise up from it with a grand, calm consciousness of
having risen to a higher and purer atmosphere, and got above all the
littlenesses and distractions that beset us here. So I have heard
charming young Quaker girls, who, in more thoughtless days, indulged in
what for them was a slight shading of worldly conformity, say that it
was to them a blessed rest when they put on the strict, plain dress, and
felt that they really had taken up the cross and turned their backs on
the world. I can conceive of doing this, much more easily than I can of
striking the exact line between worldly conformity and noble aspiration,
in the life I live now."

"My dear child," said I, "we all overlook one great leading principle of
our nature, and that is, that we are made to find a higher pleasure in
self-sacrifice than in any form of self-indulgence. There is something
grand and pathetic in the idea of an entire self-surrender, to which
every human soul leaps up, as we do to the sound of martial music.

"How many boys of Boston and New York, who had lived effeminate and idle
lives, felt this new power uprising in them in our war! How they
embraced the dirt and discomfort an