of Friends in
Philadelphia, when Benjamin West developed a talent for painting,
regarding such talent as an indication of the will of Him who had
bestowed it. So I find many of them taking pleasure in the poetry of
Scott, Longfellow, and Whittier, as developments of his wisdom who gives
to the human soul its different faculties and inspirations.

More delightful society than a cultivated Quaker family cannot be found:
the truthfulness, genuineness, and simplicity of character, albeit not
wanting, at proper times, a shrewd dash of worldly wisdom, are very
refreshing.

Mrs. W. and I went to the studio of Hervey, the Scotch artist. Both he
and his wife received us with great kindness. I saw there his
Covenanters celebrating the Lord's Supper--a picture which I could not
look at critically on account of the tears which kept blinding my eyes.
It represents a bleak hollow of a mountain side, where a few trembling
old men and women, a few young girls and children, with one or two young
men, are grouped together, in that moment of hushed prayerful repose
which precedes the breaking of the sacramental bread. There is something
touching always about that worn, weary look of rest and comfort with
which a sick child lies down on a mother's bosom, and like this is the
expression with which these hunted fugitives nestle themselves beneath
the shadow of their Redeemer; mothers who had seen their sons "tortured,
not accepting deliverance"--wives who had seen the blood of their
husbands poured out on their doorstone--children with no father but
God--and bereaved old men, from whom, every child had been rent--all
gathering for comfort round the cross of a suffering Lord. In such hours
they found strength to suffer, and to say to every allurement of worldly
sense and pleasure as the drowning Margaret Wilson said to the tempters
in her hour of martyrdom, "I am _Christ's child_--let me go."

Another most touching picture of Hervey's commemorates a later scene of
Scottish devotion and martyr endurance scarcely below that of the days
of the Covenant. It is called Leaving the Manse.

We in America all felt to our heart's core a sympathy with that high
endurance which led so many Scottish ministers to forsake their
churches, their salaries, the happy homes where their children were born
and their days passed, rather than violate a principle.

This picture is a monument of this struggle. There rises the manse
overgrown with its flowering vi