pewful of ruddy daughters, and endlessly
beaming round at his fellow-worshippers, as much as to say, "Didn't I
say he was the man for New Zion?"

The old channels were beginning to fill with the new spirit, the old
disused machinery was once more in motion. In two months' time every
possible form of meeting was in a healthy condition of attendance,
prayer-meeting, church-meeting, mothers' meeting, Bible class, Dorcas
society, Band of Hope, Sunday-school, all briskly in motion; and the
ladies, led by Jenny, were all as busy as bees over a bazaar. New Zion
had indeed become a veritable merry-go-round of religious and social
activities. Yes, it was beginning to move, indeed, it was almost
beginning to hum--another few months and it would fairly whizz, as Eli
Moggridge had foreseen; and the sound of the humming and the speed of
the whizzing would grow louder and louder and faster and faster, till
not merely Zion Place and Zion Alley and Zion Passage and Zion Street
heard it and were caught up in the infectious dance, but the very High
Street itself should hum and whizz.

The High Street! what are High Streets to the soul of Theophilus
Londonderry? What is Coalchester itself?--though that shall soon be
humming and whizzing too. This is but the whirling centre of the
ever-spreading wheel of force that has begun to turn at New Zion.
Coalchester will spin soon, and then the disappointed fields around it,
then the neighbouring towns would join the reel, and so on and on,
faster and faster, madder and madder, till even London itself moves, and
the world that changes its axis at the will of any strong spirit will
whirl its immeasurable velocities around the vortex pulpit of Theophilus
Londonderry.

Yes, the pebble had only been thrown in at New Zion.

CHAPTER VI

OF A WONDERFUL QUALITY IN WOMEN

Darwin expended many years of his life in the study of disagreeable
animals, that he might prove the adaptability of organism to
environment. How much pleasanter and briefer had been his task, if he
had begun his studies at once with the creature whose long history has
been one unbroken succession of inspired and noble adaptations!

Woman's adaptability to man is one of the most mysterious, as it is
perhaps the most pathetic, of all the modes of her mysterious being.
Like certain protection-seeking animals, she is always the colour of the
rock, the husband-rock, in whose shadow she lives. Sometimes, of course,
she is her o