em; but if you had, how could you give them up? Jesus was the
great Saviour of mankind, but next to Him it seems as if the children
had been the little saviours, from the time the first one was born until
this very day!"

"Yee, I've no doubt they keep the worst of the world's people, those
that are living in carnal marriage without a thought of godliness,--I've
no doubt children keep that sort from going to the lowest perdition,"
allowed Eldress Abby; "and those we bring up in the Community make the
best converts; but to a Shaker, the greater the sacrifice, the greater
the glory. I wish you was gathered in, Susanna, for your hands and feet
are quick to serve, your face is turned toward the truth, and your heart
is all ready to receive the revelation."

"I wish I needn't turn my back on one set of duties to take up another,"
murmured Susanna, timidly.

"Yee; no doubt you do. Your business is to find out which are the higher
duties, and then do _those_. Just make up your mind whether you'd
rather replenish earth, as you've been doing, or replenish heaven, as
we're trying to do.--But I must go to my work; ten o'clock in the
morning's a poor time to be discussing doctrine! You're for weeding,
Susanna, I suppose?"

Brother Ansel was seated at a grindstone under the apple trees, teaching
(intermittently) a couple of boys to grind a scythe, when Susanna came
to her work in the herb-garden, Sue walking discreetly at her heels.

Ansel was a slow-moving, humorously-inclined, easy-going Brother, who
was drifting into the kingdom of heaven without any special effort on
his part.

"I'd 'bout as lives be a Shaker as anything else," had been his rather
dubious statement of faith when he requested admittance into the band of
Believers. "No more crosses, accordin' to my notion, an' consid'able
more chance o' crowns!"

His experience of life "on the Adamic plane," the holy estate of
matrimony, being the chief sin of this way of thought, had disposed him
to regard woman as an apparently necessary, but not especially
desirable, being. The theory of holding property in common had no
terrors for him. He was generous, unambitious, frugal-minded, somewhat
lacking in energy, and just as actively interested in his brother's
welfare as in his own, which is perhaps not saying much. Shakerism was
to him not a craving of the spirit, not a longing of the soul, but a
simple, prudent theory of existence, lessening the various risks that
man is