Page:A Colonial Wooing.djvu/27

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A COLONIAL WOOING

brighter days long gone, and who can indulge in retrospective thought without its sobering the countenance, when the present ill compares to the past? Not that the woman was positively unhappy, but she had opposed the suggestion of coming to America, when broached, and yielded with but a mere show of grace. In short, in spite of much effort and prayer, she could not quite overcome her disappointment; and then Friend Stacy had seen the country from a man's point of view, and the acquiring of an estate being six-sevenths of his thought, he had grossly misrepresented the country, and there were endless hardships that the woman had to endure for years after their arrival. Matthew Watson, too, was wholly engrossed in the same worldly occupation of acquiring an estate.

To be poor and yet a Friend was simply a contradiction. Inability to acquire wealth argued an understanding too feeble to appreciate the teachings of George Fox. Business, the concerns of the world, may perhaps not have been quite six-sevenths of

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