The same old Scotchman, now seventy-three years old, and a cheery old fellow, who had known the elder Owen, and has lived as a Shaker forty years, I asked, "Well, on the whole, reviewing your life, do you think it a success?" He replied, clearly with the utmost sincerity: "Certainly; I have been living out the highest aspirations my mind was capable of. The best I knew has been realized for and around me here. With my ideas of society I should have been unfit for any thing in the world, and unhappy because every thing around me would have worked contrary to my belief in the right and the best. Here I found my place and my work, and have been happy and content, seeing the realization of the highest I had dreamed of." Considering the homeliness of the buildings, which mostly have the appearance of mere factories or human hives, I asked Elder Frederick whether, if they were to build anew, they would not aim at some architectural effect, some beauty of design. He replied with great positiveness, "No, the beautiful, as you call it, is absurd and abnormal. It has no business with us. The divine man has no right to waste money upon what you would call beauty, in his house or his daily life, while there are people living in misery." In building anew, he would take care to have more light, a more equal distribution of heat, and a more general care for protection and comfort, because these things tend to health and long life. But no beauty. He described to me amusingly the disgust he had experienced in a costly New York dwelling, where he saw carpets nailed down on the floor, "of course with piles of dust beneath, never swept away, and of which I had to breathe;" and with heavy picture-frames hung against the walls, also the receptacles of dust. "You people in the world are not clean according to our Shaker notions. And what is the use of pictures?" he added scornfully. [Illustration: A SHAKER ELDER.] They have paid much attention to the early Jewish policy in Palestine, and the laws concerning the distribution of land, the Sabbatical year, service, and the collection of debts, are praised by them as establishing a far better order of things for the world in general than that which obtains in the civilized world to-day. They hold strongly to the equality of women with men, and look forward to the day when women shall, in the outer world as in their own societies, hold office as well as men. "Here we find the women just as able as men in all business affairs, and far more spiritual." "Suppose a woman wanted, in your family, to be a blacksmith, would you consent?" I asked; and he replied, "No, because this would bring men and women into relations which we do not think wise." In fact, while they call men and women equally to the rulership, they very sensibly hold that in general life the woman's work is in the house, the man's out of doors; and there is no offer to confuse the two.