look, had they had mutual confidence enough to reciprocate it,
might have renewed all their old feelings, and sent them back,
resolved to sustain each other amid the struggles of the world.
But the crisis passed and never came again. Just then, also, the
children, roused by their mother's voice, looked up, and added
their wailing accents to the testimony borne by all the
Canterbury pilgrims against the world from which they fled.

"We are tired and hungry!" cried they. "Is it far to the Shaker
village?"

The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into each other's
eyes. They had but stepped across the threshold of their homes,
when lo! the dark array of cares and sorrows that rose up to warn
them back. The varied narratives of the strangers had arranged
themselves into a parable; they seemed not merely instances of
woful fate that had befallen others, but shadowy omens of
disappointed hope and unavailing toil, domestic grief and
estranged affection, that would cloud the onward path of these
poor fugitives. But after one instant's hesitation, they opened
their arms, and sealed their resolve with as pure and fond an
embrace as ever youthful love had hallowed.

"We will not go back," said they. "The world never can be dark to
us, for we will always love one another."

Then the Canterbury pilgrims went up the hill, while the poet
chanted a drear and desperate stanza of the Farewell to his Harp,
fitting music for that melancholy band. They sought a home where
all former ties of nature or society would be sundered, and all