As we all enjoyed brisk exercise, even with the thermometer below zero, we took long walks and sleighrides during the day, and thus the winter months glided quickly by, while the glorious summer on those blue hills was a period of unmixed enjoyment.  At this season we arose at five in the morning for a long ride on horseback through the beautiful Mohawk Valley and over the surrounding hills.  Every road and lane in that region was as familiar to us and our ponies, as were the trees to the squirrels we frightened as we cantered by their favorite resorts.

Part of the time Margaret Christie, a young girl of Scotch descent, was a member of our family circle.  She taught us French, music, and dancing.  Our days were too short for all we had to do, for our time was not wholly given to pleasure.  We were required to keep our rooms in order, mend and make our clothes, and do our own ironing.  The latter was one of my mother’s politic requirements, to make our laundry lists as short as possible.

Ironing on hot days in summer was a sore trial to all of us; but Miss Christie, being of an inventive turn of mind, soon taught us a short way out of it.  She folded and smoothed her undergarments with her hands and then sat on them for a specified time.  We all followed her example and thus utilized the hours devoted to our French lessons and, while reading “Corinne” and “Telemaque,” in this primitive style we ironed our clothes.  But for dresses, collars and cuffs, and pocket handkerchiefs, we were compelled to wield the hot iron, hence with these articles we used all due economy, and my mother’s object was thus accomplished.

As I had become sufficiently philosophical to talk over my religious experiences calmly with my classmates who had been with me through the Finney revival meetings, we all came to the same conclusion—­that we had passed through no remarkable change and that we had not been born again, as they say, for we found our tastes and enjoyments the same as ever.  My brother-in-law explained to us the nature of the delusion we had all experienced, the physical conditions, the mental processes, the church machinery by which such excitements are worked up, and the impositions to which credulous minds are necessarily subjected.  As we had all been through that period of depression and humiliation, and had been oppressed at times with the feeling that all our professions were arrant hypocrisy and that our last state was worse than our first, he helped us to understand these workings of the human mind and reconciled us to the more rational condition in which we now found ourselves.  He never grew weary of expounding principles to us and dissipating the fogs and mists that gather over young minds educated in an atmosphere of superstition.