apel. This character presents a model of the chapel to the Church, who
in stately measures of verse, receives the gift, and asks to know what
the services of the people are to be. A series of scenes are the answer.
Women and children come with their burdens of sickness and poverty and
are helped. A battalion of boys show their drill and receive prizes.
Various clubs offer entertainment. Strangers of different nationalities
are welcomed one after another, and before the evening is over one has
seen an exhibition of model devices for making a church touch every side
of the life in a community. Of course a church that has no benevolent
activities in working order could not hope to provide a pageant that
would have dramatic interest. A dead church could only betray its
poverty. And yet--perhaps it would be salutary for some churches if they
could be stung into such betrayal: it might awaken them to a sense of
their own losses of the joy of giving and of doing.

A story that has been passed down from generation to generation can be
used in a pageant. This is delightfully illustrated in a scene from _The
Mohawk Trail_, a pageant given in the summer of 1914 at North Adams,
Massachusetts, in honor of the re-opening after many centuries of disuse
of an old path over the Hoosac Mountain that used to be the connecting
link between the Iroquois Indians of New York and the tribes of New
England. Eleven hundred persons took part in this great play. There were
Indians, early settlers, Quakers, Revolutionary soldiers, Spirits of the
Pines and Spirits of the Waters, the Little Creatures of the Swamp, and
so on. The inhabitants of several towns took part and the Muse of
Cooperation (a newcomer in that select Greek group!) must have waved
happy wings over the whole mountain region.

The scene referred to was based on the following story: There were many
Quakers among the early settlers in that region and among them was a
pretty young Quaker sister that an English officer fell in love with,
thereupon asking her father to give him her hand in marriage. The old
gentleman said: "If thee will give up thy fighting, thy sword and thy
sinful coat of scarlet, and become a good Quaker gentleman, thee may
have my daughter, sir, for she loves thee." The officer, it is said, did
give up his commission, marry the pretty Quaker and adopt the Quaker
garb and the Quaker principles.

In the pageant this quaint incident appears in this wise: The British
o