coverings during the entire meeting.  For 45 minutes, not the least effort in any lingual direction was made; no one said a word for three-quarters of an hour.  There was a good deal of stirring on the forms, and creaking sounds were periodically heard; the whole indicating that the sitting posture had become uneasy, and that the paint, through warmth, had got tenacious.  There was, however, neither talking nor whispering indulged in.  The elderly Quakers, with their broad-brimmed, substantial hats, and white neckcloths, kept their eyes closed for a season, then opened them and looked ahead pensively, then shut them serenely again,—­just

As men of inward light are wont
To turn their optics to upon ’t.

The Quakeresses on the other side followed a similar programme.  We saw only three of them in the olden dress—­only three with narrow-barrelled high crowned bonnets, made of brown silk and garnished with white silk strings.  The younger branches of Quakerdom seemed more conventional than their ancestors in general dress.  There was a slight dash of antiquity in their style; but their hats and bonnets, their coats and shawls had evidently been made for ornament as well as use.  Originally Quakers were peculiarly stringent in respect to the plainness of their clothes; what they wore was always good, always made out of something which could not be beaten for its excellence of quality; but it was always simple, always out of the line of shoddy and bespanglement.  But Quakerism is neither immaculate nor invincible; time is changing its simplicity, its quaint old fashioned solidity of dress; “civilisation” is quietly eating away its rigidity; and the day is coming when Quakerism will don the same suit as the rest of the world.  For the first ten minutes we were in the chapel silence was not to us so much of a singularity; but when the Town Hall clock struck seven, when the machinery in the dim steeple of Trinity Church, which adjoins, gave a slow confirmation of it, and when all the little clocks in the neighbouring houses—­for you could hear them on account of the general silence—­chirped out sharply the same thing, one began to feel dubious and mystified.  But the Quakers took all quietly, and even the children present sat still.  The chime of another hour quarter came in due order; still there was no sign of action.  Two minutes afterwards, an elderly gentleman, whose eyes had been kept close during the greater part of the time which had passed, suddenly leaned forward; the “congregation” followed his example in a crack, and for ten minutes they prayed, the elderly gentleman leading the way in a rather high-keyed voice, which he singularly modulated.  But there was not much of “the old Foxian orgasm” manifested by him; he was serene, did not shake, was not agonised.  He finished as he began without any warning; the general assemblage was seated in a second; and for seven minutes there was another reign of taciturnity.  When that time had elapsed the