So she shook her head, bridal hat and all, and clapped her hands, and shouted “Giggers!”
Up and down the Street of Cairo ran the merriment and laughter, and the happiest-hearted of all were Dinah and Ben. Peal on peal of laughter rang out on the sunny air, Dinah leading the chorus.
Manton Marlowe looked down the avenue of laughing, friendly, kindly faces, and then turned to the beaming faces of Dinah and Ben.
“I never saw anything on earth so funny as that,” he said.
“No!” said Grandfather Marlowe, “and that is the funniest thing that you will see at the Fair.”
“I think that you are right,” said Mr. Marlowe; “and there is a lesson too in all this light-hearted scene: people may so laugh as not to give offence. Look! Dinah is the happiest of all, and there is not a person here that would not be glad to do her a favor! How happy is everything here! The hearts of all people here beat as one.”
“This is a good world,” said the old Quaker.
A few days afterwards the trio saw a calf run away from a mock sacrifice. The priest ran after him, and a comical scene followed; but Mr. Marlowe did not change his mind in regard to the laughing crowd of the Street of Cairo. That was the funniest scene that he saw at the Fair.
FOLK-LORE STORY.
MIRACULOUS SUSAN OF QUAKER HILL.
Imprimis, the reader will ask why the woman in our title with the simple name of Susan was called “miraculous,” and, secundus, where is Quaker Hill. I will answer the last question first, and try to give the reader a view of the picturesque elevation where George Fox preached in the glorious old Rhode Island of Governor Coddington and of Roger Williams; and as for that said useful woman, who was indispensable to the old families of the once Indian country of Pokonoket in the trying days of dipping candles, picking live geese, and at “killing-time,” our story will seek to portray the one marvellous and mysterious event of her otherwise uneventful life.
I should say that the quaint, plain Quaker meeting-house on the historic elevation near Portsmouth, R. I., is the most interesting church in all America. It stands for the old Rhode Island principle of soul-liberty, as set forth in Roger Williams’s day—and what could stand for more? It is now very much what it was two hundred years ago, when a rich Rhode Islander proposed to offer George Fox a salary to remain on the Island as preacher,—which caused the good man to flee.
They do not do so now, to be sure, but times have a little changed, even among the hillside farmers on the Garden Island of the New World.
I recently attended a Friends’ meeting at the quaint, roomy church on Quaker Hill. The Narragansett Bay rolled in the distance as clear and blue as when George Fox himself must have beheld it in 1671, or more than two hundred years ago. The Hill is still the Mecca of the Societies of Friends, and may be found on the Old Colony Railroad near Portsmouth, R. I., some eight miles from Newport, and a few miles from the Barton-Prescott house, of historic fame.