Thus favorably situated for study, she takes up the doctrines of the Gospel as believed and taught by the Methodists, and makes rapid proficiency. Her pastor, one of the flaming heralds of early Methodism in New England, furnished her with the best of reading, and all her associates in the studies and active work of Zion wondered at the rapid progress of the disinherited girl. Little could they realize how vividly those doctrines shone in her heart as she came out of the "fiery furnace," and how intensely interested she now was in principles which had cost her so much, yet were worth, in her account, infinitely more, and well deserved to be studied and propagated. A young man belonging to the Methodists of that city now enters into our narrative. He is above the ordinary size, about twenty-eight years of age, and some four or five years before this was clearly converted under the preaching of Bishop Asbury. He also is a teacher, and a very sound, logical student of Methodist doctrines and usages. It is not many months before it is noticed that a mutual attachment seems to be springing up between this young man and Elizabeth, above the ordinary sympathies of teachers and church classmates. And as they had been acquainted from childhood, and fully understood each other's history and families, and were members together of a society of plain people, they did not consider a long courtship necessary. They were both of Yankee stock, both escaping from Calvinism and ardently attached to Methodism, both studious and competent to teach, and loved to teach, and both were active workers in the church they ardently loved. So Joshua Arnold, aged twenty-nine, and Elizabeth Ward, aged twenty-one, were united in holy matrimony in the charming month of May, the last year of the eighteenth century. Thus closed the maiden life and homeless loneliness of the disinherited daughter. She had been ruthlessly turned out of a stately mansion which she loved as her birthplace and childhood home, disinherited from her rightful heirship to several thousands, and disowned by her family, whose well-being she had faithfully labored to promote, and all for no fault of hers, but wholly for a matter of conscience and principle. But in less than a year she was settled in life in a home of which she was mistress, with a worthy husband, of church membership and affinities like her own, and in the free enjoyment of church privileges and holy fellowships, for which her persecuted soul had "panted as the hart panteth for the water brooks." PART II. THE GREAT WORK OF LIFE. * * * * * CHAPTER I. ELIZABETH AS MISTRESS OF THE "COTTAGE CHAPEL."