Catherine and Harriet Beecher were not the only possessors of glowing dramatic inspirations in the early days. We had not been fully settled here very many lustrums before the submerged river of artistic feeling came to the surface in the form of vivid oratory and elaborate dialogue; and when there began to be Sunday Schools there were Sunday School concerts with tableaux of an unworldly sort, with dialogues and with companies of young people who, in a small and innocuous way, engaged in exercises that might be called acting. This was found more or less all over New England and went with the New England migration into New York, and Ohio, and then farther west. Many thousands of angels with tinsel crowns and tissue-paper wings have filled the spaces between pulpit and organ in the little white churches that have sprung up beside every hill along what we may call the New England belt--the course of the travels westward across the continent as the generations of descendants have passed on and built and subdued the soil and planted schools and churches along the northern latitudinal lines. The story of Catherine Beecher illustrates too the fact that the prejudice in the dwellers in country districts against the use of dramatic forms of entertainment is based after all not so much upon the dramatic representation itself as upon certain conditions and associations often found connected with theatrical displays as carried on in larger towns and cities and believed to be necessary to the existence of theatrical life. There is a village in Illinois with a population of nine hundred where the majority of the church-going people--and most of the inhabitants of the town belong to that class--have been of the opinion that it is a wicked thing to go to see a play if it is enacted by some company of play-actors such as might come along on their theatrical route; yet in that town for years the townspeople have been giving plays of their own, in which nearly the whole population of the place would join, old and young, rich and poor, wise and unwise. The whole family from grandmother to grandchild will sometimes appear in one play, and all the cousins and relatives of the whole "team-haul community" will come to see. They give many standard melodramas, and they have also tried their hand at Shakespearean drama, to the great enjoyment and uplift of themselves, both those that thoroughly capture the meaning of the play by training for the parts, and those that closely if charitably attend and listen. Why should not this be done in every small town? Why should not the unused building, an old barn, a store-loft, be transformed into a country theater, where the whole village may assemble twice a week or oftener, and run through a play together, getting joy and culture at once?