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Seth Gilmore had been an orphan almost from his childhood.
At the death of his last remaining parent, he was taken home by
an uncle, an old bachelor of considerable property, to which it
was supposed the boy would eventually succeed. But in the
course of a year or two, another, and a much older nephew, was
taken home; and he, being of a selfish, intriguing disposition,
soon contrived entirely to supplant the former in the affections of
the changeable uncle, who, not long after, was induced to give
the unoffending little Seth to the Shakers of the establishment of
which we are speaking. Here continuing to remain, he became,
as he grew up, noted among the Family for his faithfulness, activity
and capacity for business, and, before he had arrived at the
age of twenty, he was acknowledged by all to be one of the most
skillful and efficient hands on the farm. So far, nothing important
had occurred to him to vary the dull monotony of the Shaker
life. But although Seth began to think for himself, and become
desirous of acquiring information—a very great error he
was taught to believe by the Leaders, who hold, that “ignorance
is the mother of devotion,” and that the youth and all the common
members of the Family, should yield implicitly to those who
are gifted to think for them and instruct them in all that is necessary
to be known. The young man, however, wilfully persisted
in his notions; and, by the promptings of this heretical spirit, he
sought the acquaintance of two or three young men of the world,
(as all without the pale of the Society are termed,) who occasionally
visited the establishment for transaction of business, or
from motives of curiosity. Being eager of enquiry and quick to
comprehend, he soon gained information from these, which
showed him the falsity of many of the strange ideas and impressions
he had there imbibed respecting society at large, and

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otherwise afforded him the means of judging, from which he had
been wholly debarred; for it is the settled policy of the Leaders
of this people, in order to make faithful and contented subjects,
not only to instill into the minds of their youth the greatest possible
abhorrence of the world, which is constantly represented as
dishonest, licentious and every way corrupt, but to guard with
untiring vigilance every avenue of information that might have a
tendency to undermine or diminish the prejudices and opinions
thus inculcated. Seth's mind, however, was of a cast which,
when once called into action, was not easily to be thus trammelled;
and the doubts, which his own reason at first suggested,
being constantly strengthened by the facts gathered in his intercourse
with these young men, and the books that he borrowed of
them, and secretly read, in spite of his masters, spiritual and temporal,
he at length became a confirmed disbeliever in the creed
to which he had been brought up, and began seriously to meditate
on the expediency of sundering the ties which bound him to
the Society. But before his views had become very definitely
settled on these subjects, or any plans of future action matured,
the Shaker Leaders themselves made a movement which was intended
to anticipate or remedy any evils of the character just
named that might be growing; for these wary men, who watch the
intellectual progress of their youth as anxiously as ever did a pedagogue
that of his pupils, though with far different motives, began
to perceive about this time, that our hero's mind was becoming
rather dangerously expanded; and, although not apprised of
the means or extent of his information, yet judging from what
they had noticed, that he could not long be retained without
more than ordinary inducements, they held a secret consultation,
and finally came to the sage conclusion, that Seth's merits were
such as entitled him to promotion. Accordingly they proposed,
unexpectedly to him, to make him an assistant deacon, or one of
the overseers of business, naming some future day, not far distant,
for him to enter on the duties of his office and be admitted
to a seat with them in the council, which met from time to time
to deliberate on the temporal concerns of the Family. This gave
a new direction to his thoughts, and for awhile quieted his

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growing discontent. Still extremely anxious, however, to know more
of the world, he soon claimed the privilege of going abroad on
missions of trade—a privilege which he knew was sometimes accorded
to those exercising the office that had been offered him,
provided they were considered sufficiently tried and trustworthy.
But in this fond wish of his heart he was unexpectedly doomed
to disappointment, for which he was indebted, as he soon discovered,
to the influence of one man, the person we have already
introduced as playing the spy upon the young couple in the orchard.
This man, who went by the appellation of Elder Higgins,
had for some time manifested towards Seth an unusual
degree of coldness and distrust, which the latter till now had but
little heeded. But this last act caused his ill-will to be heartily
reciprocated on the part of the young man; and circumstances
soon occurred which made the breach irreparable. These circumstances
were found to have reference to a third person—the
young, innocent and lovely Martha, towards whom the elder, about
this time, began to pursue a course of conduct as strange as it
was questionable.

Martha had been brought to this establishment when eight or
ten years of age by her parents, both of whom, at the same time,
joined the Family, turning into the common fund the whole of
the little property they possessed. All the acknowledged relations
between parent or child, from that moment entirely ceasing,
the little girl was left wholly to the guidance and instruction of
the Elders and Eldresses, to whom the care of the youth is entrusted;
and, through her docility and her meek and confiding
disposition, she had readily imbibed the doctrines, and, for the
greater part of her girl-hood, implicitly trusted in the creed that
was taught her, exhibiting in her exemplary conduct a bright pattern
of all that was esteemed good and lovely among the Family.
But as she verged upon womanhood, and began to give herself to
reflection; her naturally clear and discriminating mind, moved,
perhaps, by the associations of her childhood that still hung about
her, or the observations she had made upon the conduct of some
of the Leaders, forced upon her questions and doubts which greatly
perplexed her to answer or solve. These, it is true, at first,

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through the pious impulses of her truly devotional heart, were often
rejected as the temptations of Satan; but they as often returned
to disturb the quiet of her pure and gentle bosom; and,
although, in spite of her strivings to the contrary, she became,
though far less decidedly than the young man we have described,
a disbeliever, at least, in many of the dogmas of that creed, which
she had been taught to look upon as infallible.

Such was Martha Hilson; and it was nothing strange that two
such young persons of the different sexes as she and Seth, in the
daily habit of seeing each other, and possessing characters as congenial,
as they were, in many respects, distinguished from those
around them, should attract each other's particular notice. Nor
is it much less to be wondered at, perhaps, that such notice should
be followed by the springing up of mutual sympathies in their bosoms;
though, that these sympathies should be defined and acknowledged
by their true name, and made known by reciprocal
avowals, was, indeed, at such a place, a rare occurrence. But
Love is a cunning deviser of occasions; and, as difficult as it
might be in this case, he, at length, found a way by which the
young couple in question eventually discovered the nature of those
feelings that were silently drawing their hearts towards each other.
For a long time, however, no word or communication ever
passed between them, save that which was conveyed in the language
of the eyes. But, after awhile, the silence was broken, as
they casually met in the yard, by a simple enquiry for some third
person, and by as brief an answer. This was followed, after another
interval, of perhaps a month, when they again accidentally
met, by the interchange of a few words, on some common topic;
and, at length, on a similar chance occasion, succeeded a proposal,
on his part, to loan her a book, which, after some hesitation,
she accepted, with the promise to persue and return it, at a time
and place which he proposed for the purpose. An excuse for
meeting being thus found, occasional interviews followed, though
at none of them was a word breathed by either expressive of those
feelings, of which each felt a trembling consciousness as the true
secret of their being thus brought together. These interviews,
moreover, were of the briefest kind, and indulged in but very

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rarely; for, aware that it was one of the distinguishing articles of
their creed, that “the corruption of man is the attachment of
the sexes,” and, consequently, that all intercourse which might
lead to such attachment, should be strictly forbidden, they knew
how closely they were watched, and how surely penance of some
kind or other would follow a detection of their meetings, however
innocent the object. And such had been the extreme caution
with which this intercourse had been managed, that they felt sure
it could not have been discovered; and they supposed it remained
wholly unsuspected. In this supposition, however, they
soon found they had over confidently counted. Something in
their demeanor, some unguarded look, when they publicly met,
or some brief absence of both at the same time, had attracted the
notice of the prying Higgins; and, his jealously being thus aroused,
he commenced a system of secret espionage upon the young
couple, which would have conferred credit on a minion of the inquisition;
the result of which was, that he became convinced of
the existence of a forbidden attachment growing up between
them, and strongly suspected them, though wholly unable to ascertain
it for a fact, of holding clandistine interviews.

This personage, whose manner was as hateful as his countenance
was repulsive, and whose whole character was a strange
compound of the fanatic, the Jesuit and the voluptuary, was an
Elder in the church, in which through his pretensions to “leading
gifts,” or direct revelations from above, and his intriguing
and ambitious disposition, he had gained an influence even greater,
perhaps, than the “Elder Brother” himself, as the chief ruler
of each Shaker Family is denominated. And his ambition being
not satisfied with his spiritual dominion, he aspired to, and
by similar means obtained, an equal ascendancy in the management
of the business and temporal concerns of the establishment.
Exacting the most rigid obedience from all, requiring the most
implicit faith in all the ultra doctrines of his creed, and ever untiring
in searching out delinquencies in others, while he shielded
his own under the very convenient dogma handed down by Mother
Ann Lee for the special benefit of the peculiarly gifted like
himself, that “to the pure all things are pure,” he had become

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fairly an object of dread among the people. For these reasons,
then, if they had no others, it will be readily seen how much our
two young friends had to fear from the sanctimonious Elder; but
they had additional reasons:—He had, for some time, shown
himself remarkably sensitive in every thing that related to Martha;
and no sooner were his suspicions fairly awakened respecting
the attachment between her and Seth, than she was summoned
to meet him at the confessional alone, and in one of the
most secluded rooms in the buildings. This was several times
repeated, to the great horror of the distressed maiden, while it
awakened the most painful apprehensions in the mind of Seth,
who had become apprised of the circumstance, and but to well
conjectured the secret motives of the Elder in summoning her,
instead of him, to meet him in private; though what passed on
these occasions he had no other means of judging, than by the
mingled expression of grief and outraged feeling, which very visibly
marked the tear-stained cheeks of the poor girl on her return
from the scene of her trials.

With Seth a different course was taken; and, though no rebuke
was openly administered, or even one word was anywhere
said to him respecting the offence of which he, in common with
Martha, was suspected to be guilty, yet he soon found, that he
was not, for that reason, any the less marked for punishment.
He soon discovered, that the Elder was secretly attempting to
undermine his character with the Family; while a system of petty
annoyances was made to meet him in every thing he did, till his
life become one of constant vexation and misery; and, being no
longer tempted by the proposed office without the coveted privilege
of going abroad, he again began to meditate about leaving
the Society. But checked in this wish by a want of confidence
in his ability to succeed in the world, of which he was so little
informed, and above all by his love for Martha, and his fears for
her safety, marked, as he believed her to be, as the victim of the
licentious Elder, he here also, became the prey of conflicting emotion.
The treatment of his malicious prosecutor, however, at
length drove him to a final decision; and, having formed a new
plan in regard to his fair friend, whom he had been so reluctant
to leave, he waited only for an opportunity of seeing her alone,

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(from which, through the precautions of the Elder, he had been
for a long while debarred,) before carrying his resolve into execution.
With these remarks, we will now return to the events
which form the action of our story.