neglected in the Meeting House.
To-day I am sure no class of men in real need could appeal to the
community, or to any constituent group of it, in vain. The growth has
been along lines which, beginning in a group-compassion that has from
earliest days recompensed any poor member of the Meeting in his sudden
losses of property, have widened first to Quakers of other places, then
to other Christians, then to other men, and last of all to Quakers of
the other Quaker sect; and from Protestant to Catholic and Catholic to
Protestant.

Property seems to be sacred. Doors of houses and barns do not require
locks, but one winter there was a series of house-breakings, in which
almost every summer residence on the Hill was entered. Contents were
inspected, but nothing was stolen. But the honesty here is a passive
honesty. It is not the aggressively just fulfilment of obligation which
one finds in New England.

The Hill is a community with a high level of chastity. This may be said
of all classes, though not uniformly of all. Yet it was not always so.
The first century of the life of the Quakers here is recorded in the
minutes of Oblong Meeting as one long struggle of Quaker discipline
against unchastity. There is an amazing frankness about these records,
and a persistence in the exercise of discipline, a frequency of
accusation, proof, conviction, expulsion from the Meeting, which is
astonishing to the twentieth century reader. The best families furnished
the culprits almost as often as they supplied the accusers and
prosecuting committees. So many are the cases and so frequent the
expulsions, often for matters which might better have been ignored, but
generally for substantial offences, that one wonders who was left in the
Meeting. But men often confessed and were received again, and the
Meeting held its ground. In general it may be said that often in the
eighteenth century there were more cases of unchastity dealt with in a
year by the Meeting, in a population no larger than the present, than
have come to public knowledge in the past ten years in this community.
The change shows also in a reserve of speech upon these matters.

The characteristic pleasures of the community, as a whole, are few.
There is a group of women of leisure, of course, devoted to
bridge-whist, who come in the summer and do not go far from the Hotel.
Young men go hunting, and a few grown men are fond of fishing. The
typical person provides himself with no