Read Coast to Coast for Free Online Page B

ecstasies of their devotions. The order was imported from England in 1774, when a number of its adherents crossed the Atlantic under the leadership of the most famous of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee of Manchester. The three basic principles of the Shaker faith are: Purity of Life; Confession of Sin; Consecration of Strength, Time and Talent. Although both men and women can be Shakers, the order has a pronounced feminist bias (as Dickens discovered to his distaste when he visited a Shaker settlement in 1842). Among its declared beliefs are the Duality of the Deity, Father and Mother God; the Equality of the Sexes; and most startling, the Duality of the Christ Spirit, “as manifested by Jesus and Ann Lee”. Such unorthodoxies led to the persecution of the sect in England, the imprisonment of Mother Lee, and the eventual hegira from Lancashire to New York State.
    The Shaker women talked willingly, but with a virginal shyness. They told us that the Order was declining disastrously, chiefly because of a shortage of recruits. Young men who wanted to be Shakers were extremely rare, and the positions designed to be held by men in the hierarchy of the order were unhappily vacant, making the Shaker concept of sexual equality rather top-heavy in application: in point of harsh fact, by the end of 1961 only one male Shaker was still alive, and he was 88 years old. The Shaker statement of beliefs says that the community is to be perpetuated “by the admission of serious-minded persons, and the adoption of children”. The serious-minded persons are mostly finding their vocations elsewhere, but the settlement we were visiting was in fact a children’s home, where orphans were housed and educated. The women hoped that some of these boys and girls (whose carriage and behaviour was decorous but cheerful) would subscribe as adults to the Shaker faith. The Shakers have always been famous for handicrafts, and there was a small gift shop in one building of the orphanage. It sold well-worked aprons and dresses, in gay colours; books about the Shakers, with some forbidding portraits of eminent adherents of the past; and greetings cards made by the children, consisting of postage stamps put together to form pictures. It was all very clean, wholesome and pleasant, with an air of tempered monasticism; so scrupulously tempered, indeed, that I suspect in a few years’ time there will be no more Shakers at all, whether Elders or Sisters (this being an age and a country addicted to extremes of sin and sanctity).
    But the most attractive and memorable of all the individualistic characters of the East is the American Yankee, what is left of him; descended, as often as not, from good old English families, a living reminder of the first brave settlers, with a reputation, resolutely upheld, of taciturn boldness and financial discretion. He is of distinctive appearance—very tall and upright, long-limbed and big-chinned, with fair hair and blue eyes. One or two distinguished New England families perpetuate these characteristics almost to the point of caricature; so that some of the Saltonstalls, for example, might stand as personifications of the Yankee tradition. The Yankees have always been famous as sailors, as masters of clippers and whalers, and the memory of their sea-going heyday is still alive everywhere in maritime New England.
    Their real shrine, though, is the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, where in 1775 a handful of Yankee minute-men fought the first real battle of the Revolutionary War. It is a beautiful and moving place. The Concord River flows between meadows, and a lane lined with tall trees runs down to the bridge across it. All around, just in sight between the foliage, are handsome old colonial houses, with tall chimneys and shutters. To anyone who has seen the process of British withdrawal from some imperial responsibility or another, the little action that occurred at this spot is easy to envisage—the redcoats, withdrawing across