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Nassau House,

Nassau, New York,

May Seventeenth.

Ordered my horse at ten in the morning, and before riding on stopped at the office of the Berkshire Eagle to talk a few minutes with the editor. The route from Pittsfield lay over the Boston and Albany Turnpike, one of the villages on the way being West Lebanon. Here we had dinner. While quietly pursuing my journey afterwards, in crossing the Pittsfield Mountain, I overtook Egbert Jolls, a farmer, with whom I had a long and interesting conversation. He amused me with stories of the Lebanon Shakers, among whom he had lived many years, and whose peculiar belief and customs have always set them widely apart from other sects. Perhaps the most singular point in their doctrine is that God is dual, combining in the One Person the eternal Father and Mother of all generated nature. They believe that the revelation of God is progressive, and in its last aspect the manifestation was God revealed in the character of Mother, as an evidence of Divine affection. Ann Lee, the daughter of a Manchester blacksmith, is the founder of the sect, and considered from her holy life to be the human representation of this Divine duality. This is a strange belief, and one that is not generally known, but its adherents have among other good traits one which commends them to the respect of those who know anything of them, and that is their sober and industrious habits.

Soon after crossing the State line between Massachusetts and New York, we passed the home of Governor Samuel J. Tilden. Two years before, this popular Democrat was elected governor, by a plurality of 50,000 votes above his fellow-candidate, John A. Dix. He won popular attention by his strong opposition to certain political abuses; notably the Tweed Charter of 1870; and by incessant activity he was, in 1876, beginning to reap the laurels of a career which began while he was a student at Yale.