From that work this hitherto gaudy maiden came out as plain as a Quakeress, and hastened to the Methodist prayer meeting. Seeing her thus evidently taught of the Holy Spirit, they took hold of her case with new courage as she bowed with them crying for mercy. The prayers of the early Methodists were something wonderful, and this broken-hearted penitent drank into their wrestling spirit. They claimed for her the "exceeding great and precious promises," with mighty faith; she claimed these promises with them. They took hold on Jesus; she put her hand with theirs into His with a strong and steady grip, and He accepted her. The conversion of Elizabeth was instantaneous, and exceedingly clear and powerful, and its assurance overwhelming. Her long night was at once turned into day, and that clear daylight was also a blaze of glory. Her joy was ecstatic. Her tall form, which had been gaudily adorned, but now attired for the meek and lowly Saviour, was at times prostrated by divine power, and her regenerated soul filled with the rapture of heaven. Night and day, for weeks, her only relief from ecstasy was by settling into solid peace, thus alternating from the quiet valley of "peace that passeth understanding" to the glory-crowned hilltops of "joy unspeakable." After a sufficient time had elapsed to demonstrate the genuineness and unfading glory of her experience, Elizabeth wrote home a plain account of it, concealing nothing. This was the astounding and alienating letter that so stirred up things at the Cove. CHAPTER III. THAT ALARMING MESSAGE. The Wards, at the Cove, continued to be much troubled over Elizabeth's letter. Had a note or a messenger announced her serious illness, or her elopement or sudden death, the first pang would have terminated in some sort of relief, or at least a breathing place; but this letter was suffocating, and the dense fog seemed to grow darker as it stretched into the future. "A religious fanatic!" "A Methodist lunatic!" "Has our darling set out upon such a life?" "I'm afraid it will kill your father; it struck him dumb. I can't draw him into any conversation about her; and he is so angry!" Thus the troubled mother would talk and cry. The sisters and brothers listen to her, and, without comprehending "the prospect so awful in Betsey's future life," would keep dumb, like "daddy," and cry, like "mammy."