By this time mother and child had reached the orchard end of a row, and Brother Ansel was thirstily waiting to deliver a little more of the information with which his mind was always teeming.
“Them Boston people that come over to our public meetin' last Sunday,” he began, “they was dretful scairt 'bout what would become o' the human race if it should all turn Shakers. 'I guess you need n't worry,' I says; 'it'll take consid'able of a spell to convert all you city folks,' I says, 'an' after all, what if the world should come to an end?' I says. 'If half we hear is true 'bout the way folks carry on in New York and Chicago, it's 'bout time it stopped,' I says, 'an' I guess the Lord could do a consid'able better job on a second one,' I says, 'after findin' out the weak places in this.' They can't stand givin' up their possessions, the world's folks; that's the principal trouble with 'em! If you don't have nothin' to give up, like some o' the tramps that happen along here and convince the Elder they're jest bustin' with the fear o' God, why, o' course 't ain't no trick at all to be a Believer.”
“Did you have much to give up, Brother Ansel?” Susanna asked. “'Bout's much as any sinner ever had that jined this Community,” replied Ansel, complacently. “The list o' what I consecrated to this Society when I was gathered in was: One horse, one wagon, one two-year-old heifer, one axe, one saddle, one padlock, one bed and bedding, four turkeys, eleven hens, one pair o' plough-irons, two chains, and eleven dollars in cash. Can you beat that?”
“Oh, yes, things,” said Susanna, absent-mindedly. “I was thinking of family and friends, pleasures and memories and ambitions and hopes.”
“I guess it don't pinch you any worse to give up a hope than it would a good two-year-old heifer,” retorted Ansel; “but there, you can't never tell what folks'll hang on to the hardest! The man that drove them Boston folks over here last Sunday, did you notice him? the one that had the sister with a bright red dress an' hat on?—Land! I could think just how hell must look whenever my eye lighted on that girl's gitup!—Well, I done my best to exhort that driver, bein' as how we had a good chance to talk while we was hitchin' an' unhitchin' the team; an' Elder Gray always says I ain't earnest enough in preachin' the faith;—but he did n't learn anything from the meetin'. Kep' his eye on the Shaker bunnits, an' took notice o' the marchin' an' dancin', but he did n't care nothin' 'bout doctrine.
“'I draw the line at bein' a cerebrate,' he says. 'I'm willin' to sell all my goods an' divide with the poor,' he says, 'but I ain't goin' to lie no cerebrate. If I don't have no other luxuries, I will have a wife,' he says. 'I've hed three, an' if this one don't last me out, I'll get another, if it's only to start the kitchen fire in the mornin' an' put the cat in the shed nights!'”
IV. Louisa's Mind
Louisa, otherwise Mrs. Adlai Banks, the elder sister of Susanna s husband, was a rock-ribbed widow of forty-five summers,—forty-five winters would seem a better phrase in which to assert her age,—who resided on a small farm twenty miles from the manufacturing town of Farnham.
When the Fates were bestowing qualities of mind and heart upon the Hathaway babies, they gave the more graceful, genial, likable ones to John, not realizing, perhaps, what bad use he would make of them,—and endowed Louisa with great deposits of honesty, sincerity, energy, piety, and frugality, all so mysteriously compounded that they turned to granite in her hands. If she had been consulted, it would have been all the same. She would never have accepted John's charm of personality at the expense of being saddled with his weaknesses, and he would not have taken her cast-iron virtues at any price whatsoever.