of the day was over, and the girls were in bed, I would
take off my shoes and spend several hours of the night walking the
floor, kneeling in prayer that I might obtain the coveted gift. For five
weeks I did this without avail, when suddenly one night when the moon
was full and I was kneeling by the window, a glory seemed to overshadow
the crest of a high mountain in the distance. I thought I heard a voice
say: '_Martha, I baptize you into the spirit of love!_' I sat there
trembling for more than an hour, and when I rose, I felt that I could
love the meanest human being that ever walked the earth. I have never
had any trouble with children since that night of the vision. They seem
different to me, and I dare say I am different to them."

"I wish I could see visions!" exclaimed Susanna. "Oh, for a glory that
would speak to me and teach me truth and duty! Life is all mist,
whichever way I turn. I'd like to be lifted on to a high place where I
could see clearly."

She leaned against the frame of the open kitchen door, her delicate face
quivering with emotion and longing, her attitude simplicity and
unconsciousness itself. The baldest of Shaker prose turned to purest
poetry when Susanna dipped it in the alembic of her own imagination.

"Labor for the gift of sight!" said Martha, who believed implicitly in
spirits and visions. "Labor this very night."

It must be said for Susanna that she had never ceased laboring in her
own way for many days. The truth was that she felt herself turning from
marriage. She had lived now so long in the society of men and women who
regarded it as an institution not compatible with the highest spiritual
development that unconsciously her point of view had changed; changed
all the more because she had been so unhappy with the man she had
chosen. Curiously enough, and unfortunately enough for Susanna
Hathaway's peace of mind, the greater aversion she felt towards the
burden of the old life, towards the irksomeness of guiding a weaker
soul, towards the claims of husband on wife, the stronger those claims
appeared. If they had never been assumed!--Ah, but they had; there was
the rub! One sight of little Sue sleeping tranquilly beside her; one
memory of rebellious, faulty Jack; one vision of John, either as needing
or missing her, the rightful woman, or falling deeper in the wiles of
the wrong one for very helplessness;--any of these changed Susanna the
would-be saint, in an instant into Susanna t