Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/401

Rh Shaker-community is—admitting some small narrow peculiarities—one of the best small communities in the world, and one of the most useful in the great community.

This sect is in general not understood. People consider its dancing mode of worship to be the main principle, when in fact that might just as well be away, though I, for my part, would willingly retain it for its symbolic meaning, like the heavenly child's-play which I saw this morning.

There are seventy or eighty Shaker-communities in the free states of the Union, but that of Lebanon is the mother-community, and the others stand in a subordinate relationship to it. The sect does not appear to have increased of late years, indeed it has decreased. Every year solitary men or women, and even whole families, make their appearance to fill up the gaps which have occurred by death, or by members withdrawing from the association.

Towards the evening of this day we had a beautiful passage in the steamer across the large lake Wimpassioghee (the smile of the Great Spirit), which is scattered with small islands, and surrounded by craggy hills, and which presents splendid views of the White Mountains. Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, Adams, La Fayette, and many other republican heroes beckoned to us in Olympian majesty, amid the splendour of the brightest August sun. The sunset was most magnificent above that quiet, smiling lake. When the sun had sunk behind the mountains we reached land, and found tolerably good quarters in the inn on the shore.

The evening was cool and bright, and it was a great happiness to me to find myself in a mountain district, and to be able to approach still nearer to the giants. Everything was still and silent around us. Late, however, in the evening a “mammoth party” arrived, forty or fifty persons, ladies and gentlemen, who, like ourselves were aiming at the White Mountains, and who took the hotel by storm. Mrs. S. and I were a little out of humour with