Whether as a result of enlightenment, brought her by her own honest seeking, or a tradition in the blood, compelling her to give as well as to demand perfect liberty of conscience in the affairs of faith, this imperious mother let her tyrannously tended young brood wander whither they would along the by-ways of religious experience. To look back a moment upon the infantine struggles of these young crusaders in the Holy War is to realize afresh how far the race has travelled since that day. These mere children, with their fear of hell and of damnation, their "changes of heart," conversions, and pathetic joy at being "saved," had for their vividest remembrance of their father the abiding vision of his kneeling down with them in the great dim parlor at Ashlands, praying, with hands uplifted and with tears, that these "little ones" might not be lost forever. No one ever knew how much hold these religions ecstasies had taken upon Ethan. But John was violently wrought upon; and most impressed of all was the small but preternaturally precocious Valeria. At a time when she should have been romping in the open air or reading fairy-tales in a corner she was living through days of agonized doubt on the subject of her soul's salvation, and crying softly in the night to think of that outer darkness into which unbelievers were certain to be cast--a darkness lit only by lurid flames from "the lake that burneth forever and ever." Little John had gone through a varied and, on the whole, triumphant spiritual experience by the time he was ten. At that ripe age he was baptized by immersion on public confession of faith. His mother, having now maturer views on the subject, was not among the group at the river-side; but she made no effort to divert the boy's enthusiasm from a form of belief that for her was losing its significance. She would sit on the long white veranda in those first months of her widowhood re-reading D'Aubigné and Bishop Spalding's _History of the Protestant Reformation_, sandwiching Wesley with patristic writings, balancing Arian against Socinian, and drawing conclusions of her own, while her eldest boy was writing hymns to Apollo instead of construing his Cæsar, and John, the centre of an admiring crowd down by the river, was being dipped instead of being sprinkled, which it presently appeared was the only true and orthodox way.