“Them children!  Ain’t it awful?” muttered Hiram as a file of blue-coat boys shambled past, with hair cut square across their foreheads and bleached white with the sun.  “Ain’t got a grain of sense!  Look at ’em!—­all crowded clean out by the Shaker schools.”

And surely they were a most unpromising little crowd.  Waifs, snatched probably from some New York whirlpool of iniquity, and wearing the brute mark on their faces, which nothing in this school of their transplanting tended to erase—­a sodden little party, like stupid young beasts of burden, uncouth and awkward.

As the girls came round again, and I had settled it in my mind that there was certainly no Bessie in the room, I could watch them more calmly.  Eagerly as I sought her face, it was a relief, surely, that it was not there.  Pale to ghastliness, most of them, with high, sharpened shoulders, and features set like those of a corpse, it was indeed difficult to realize that these ascetic forms, these swaying devotees, were women—­women who might else have been wives and mothers.  Some of them wore in their hollow eyes an expression of ecstasy akin to madness, and there was not a face there that was not saintly pure.

It was a strange union that assembled under one roof these nun-like creatures, wasted and worn with their rigid lives, and the heavy, brutish men, who shambled round the room like plough-horses. Wicked eyes some of them had, mere slits through which a cunning and selfish spirit looked out.  Some faces there were of power, but in them the disagreeable traits were even more strongly marked:  the ignorant, narrow foreheads were better, less responsible, it seemed.

The singing ended, there was a sermon from a high priest who stood out imperious among his fellows.  But this was not a sermon to the flock.  It was aimed at the scanty audience of strangers with words of unblushing directness.  How men and women may continue pure in the constant hearing and repetition of such revolting arguments and articles of faith is matter of serious question.  The divine instincts of maternity, the sweet attractions of human love, were thrown down and stamped under foot in the mud of this man’s mind; and at each peroration, exhorting his hearers to shake off Satan, a strong convulsive shiver ran through the assembly.  “Bessie is certainly not here:  possibly she’s still at Watervliet,” I whispered to; Hiram as the concluding hymn began.  “But I’ll have a chance at Elder Nebson and that woman before they leave; the house.”

The rain had ceased for some time, and as again the wild chant went up from those harsh strained voices, a stray sunbeam, like a gleam of good promise, shot across the floor.  But what was this little figure stealing in through a side-door and joining the circling throng?—­a figure in lilac gown, with the stiff muslin cap and folded neckerchief.  She entered at the farthest corner of the room, and I watched her approach with beating heart.  Something in the easy step was familiar, and yet it could not be.  She passed around with the rest in the inner circle, and, leaning forward, I held my breath lest indeed it might be she.