side, with the scoop bonnets on the other, used to excite my curiosity,
but I did not like to sit still so long. Sometimes not a word would be
said, and after an hour of profound silence, two of the old men on one
of the upper seats would shake hands. Then a general shaking of hands
ensued on both sides of the house, and meeting was out.

Many readers will recall gentle Charles Lamb's thoughtful paper on "A
Quakers' Meeting." [Footnote: See _Essays of Elia_.] Several of his
reflections rise up so vividly before me as I write these lines that I
cannot forbear quoting them. "What," he asks, "is the stillness of the
desert, compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of
fishes?--here the goddess reigns and revels.--'Boreas, and Cesias, and
Argestes loud,' do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment
the brawl--nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds
--than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and
rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her
deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and
less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of
midnight.

"There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect
I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which
he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a
Quakers' Meeting.--Those first hermits did certainly understand this
principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly, but in
shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is
bound to his brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In
secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a
long winter evening, with a friend sitting by--say a wife--he, or she,
too (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or