of brothers and sisters.
Moreover her sister Harriet (afterward Harriet Beecher Stowe) being at
about this period of her youth filled with the aspiration to become a
great tragic poet, wrote reams and reams of blank verse on a classic
theme developed in dramatic form. By this time, however, the elder
dominant sister Catherine must have seen the error of her ways, for
finding Harriet one day in the act of composition, she took her
precious play away from her, bidding her to cease this waste of time and
go to work on her Butler's _Analogy of Nature and Religion_. And Harriet
obeyed.

This story is told to afford one illustration of the fact that the
divine endowments of human genius cannot be so easily crushed out. A
theory will not accomplish it.

Catherine and Harriet Beecher were not the only possessors of glowing
dramatic inspirations in the early days. We had not been fully settled
here very many lustrums before the submerged river of artistic feeling
came to the surface in the form of vivid oratory and elaborate dialogue;
and when there began to be Sunday Schools there were Sunday School
concerts with tableaux of an unworldly sort, with dialogues and with
companies of young people who, in a small and innocuous way, engaged in
exercises that might be called acting. This was found more or less all
over New England and went with the New England migration into New York,
and Ohio, and then farther west. Many thousands of angels with tinsel
crowns and tissue-paper wings have filled the spaces between pulpit and
organ in the little white churches that have sprung up beside every hill
along what we may call the New England belt--the course of the travels
westward across the continent as the generations of descendants have
passed on and built and subdued the soil and planted schools and
churches along the northern latitudinal lines.

The story of Catherine Beecher illustrates too the fact that the
prejudice in the dwellers in country districts against the use of
dramatic forms of entertainment is based after all not so much upon the
dramatic representation itself as upon certain conditions and
associations often found connected with theatrical displays as carried
on in larger towns and cities and believed to be necessary to the
existence of theatrical life.

There is a village in Illinois with a population of nine hundred where
the majority of the church-going people--and most of the inhabitants of
the town belong to th