the Friends' concerns, but it would seem as if as much effort was required to shake the dust from their shoes, when they entered meeting on the first day, as to shake the worldliness from their thoughts. How else, then, can we explain the remark during silent meeting one fifth day morning of Mahlon Stacy, when, hearing a loud clap of thunder, he muttered audibly, "Tut-tut-tut! my hay." Duty had brought him from the meadow to the meeting, but at a critical moment had left him in the lurch.
But more than all else that had sobered Ruth's mother was Ruth herself; for, as events in the past had proved, the mother was conscientiously a Friend and accepted Fox implicitly as her teacher and guide, and now as her daughter approached womanhood, she essayed, but in vain, to have her like unto herself. Ruth, although surrounded by Quaker influences all her life, soon began to make, so the world holds, the fatal mistake of thinking for herself. While never disobedient as a child, she was always independent, and the excellence of her judgment
22
