Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/31

 AMONG THE SHAKERS.

��23

��out from the wall, are ranged shovel and tongs, dirt-pan and brush; and near at hand in the passage-ways, in immense presses reaching from floor to ceil- ing, containing shelves and a chest-like recess, is laid the fuel for immediate use. Everything is constructed and adjusted with reference to the fact that the occu- pants of those rooms are never to change their habitation. " We are here to stay. We shall never move from here. We are here to live always," said one of the sis- ters; and so all her personal belongings are together, close at hand, as conven- iently and carefully arranged as she chooses to have them. She has her small properties, her individual rights, and ex- ercises her tastes as any other woman might. Every sister has one piece of furniture which is her own — a sort of cabinet, more or less elegant or elaborate, which combines work-table, writing- desk, and book-case, abounding with pigeon-holes, and lockers, and delightful little drawers and hiding-places, and made high enough to screen her as she sits before it in her splint-bottom chair. It is in the furnishing of these that there is the best opportunity for showing fem- inine tact and daintiness; in the vase of flowers, the book, or picture, or bit of ornamental work.

Notwithstanding the absence of deco- ration on the walls, of draperies, and the luxurious and ornamental articles of the dwellings of the world's people, the liv- ing rooms, which three or four of the sisters share together, are anything but austere ; nor do they lack in elements of the picturesque. Those homely but cosy interiors — what a quaint, old-world look they had, recalling some of the medieval paintings, where the few accessories to the human figures are made the most of, and depicted in such a realistic way as to seize at once upon the fancy ! There were long, low-ceiled apartments, with broad benches and presses in warm tints, with narrow, nun-like beds, and a pot or two of flowers on the window-seat, which reminded one of certain old pictures, where the virgin Mary and her kinswom- en are represented with pre-Raphaelite fidelity. And in the house where noth- ing was done but the spinning and weav-

��ing of the strong, bright carpets, it seemed as if one had been transported into some other age than this. It was like going back to an old Saxon house- hold, where, while the master and all his men were away, on hunt or fora} r, the mistress and her maidens, in snowy wim- ple and kerchief, sat and spun, or wrought at tapestry, to enter those rooms where shuttles and wheels, and reels were fly- ing, and among bright colored yarns and webs, those women were living a busy, domestic, social life, in a home where none but women entered.

Their mode of co-operative housekeep- ing might furnish some hints to those outside who have faith that any system of the kind can ever be made available. Each has her allotted work, and when it is done, her time is her own ; and in most cases there is rotation enough to relieve the life from monotony ; for, after a cer- tain number of weeks, she takes her turn at something different. There is nothing to worry about. She has ner one thing to do, and with no others has she any concern. All the bread for one family and the guests is baked in one place, where young girls in snowy caps were waiting about for the loaves to rise ; in the laundry, others hovered about the long ironing boards, or tended the get- ting up of the diaphanous caps, which were receiving their finishing stiffness in an oven; in the mending-room, in the dairy — shining in cleanliness and frag- rant of cheese — and in the poultry-yard, some young, and some old had there work, and one Scotch lassie tended their flower garden. There was no lack of good feeling or pleasant manners ; but on the contrary, while preserving a de- gree of reticence, natural to their separa- tion as a people, there was sisterly ten. derness and regard for one another's rights and feelings, not always found where that relation is one of blood in- stead of association.

In passing from the Lower to the Up- per Village, we went by their burial- ground, which is a plain field, unadorned and unshaded, except by a few pines and firs and low poplars. There, with the long grass waving above them, lie in regular rows, all who have died there —

�� �