in their lives and conduct, wonderfully industrious,
miraculously clean and neat, and incredibly shrewd, thrifty and
money-making.

Their dress is hideous, and their worship, to which they admit
spectators, consists of a fearful species of dancing, in which the
whole number of them engage, going round and round their vast hall
or temple of prayer, shaking their hands like the paws of a dog
sitting up to beg, and singing a deplorable psalm-tune in brisk jig
time. The men without their coats, in their shirt-sleeves, with
their lank hair hanging on their shoulders, and a sort of loose
knee-breeches--knickerbockers--have a grotesque air of stage Swiss
peasantry. The women without a single hair escaping from beneath their
hideous caps, mounted upon very high-heeled shoes, and every one of them
with a white handkerchief folded napkin-fashion and hanging over her
arm. In summer they all dress in white, and what with their pale,
immovable countenances, their ghost-like figures, and ghastly, mad
spiritual dance, they looked like the nuns in "Robert the Devil,"
condemned, for their sins in the flesh, to post-mortem decency and
asceticism, to look ugly, and to dance like ill-taught bears.

The whole exhibition was at once so frightful and so ludicrous, that I
very nearly went off into hysterics, when I first saw them.

We shall be in London, I hope, in the beginning of May next year, when I
trust you will be there also, when I will edify you with all my new
experiences of life, in this "other world," and teach you how to dance
like a Shaker. Be a good Christian, forgive me, and write to me again,
and believe me,

Yours truly,
F. A. B.

BRANCHTOWN, June 27th, 1835.
MY DEAREST H----,

... Did I tell you that the other day our farmer's wife sent me word
that she had seen me walking in the garden in a gown that she had liked
very much, and wished I would let her have the pattern of it? This
message surprised me a little, but, upon due reflection, I carried the
gown down to her with an agreeable sense of my own graceful
condescension. My farmer's wife gave me small thanks, and I am sure
thought I had done just what I ought....

I have resumed my riding, and am beginning to feel once more like my
unmarried self. I may have told you that I had some time ago a pretty
thoroughbred mare, spirit