About 1770, the influence and power of a woman named Anne Lee became acknowledged among a strange community, the Shakers. We are told that through her at this time "the present testimony of salvation and eternal life was fully opened, according to the special gift and revelation of God,"--words that are not unfamiliar to us of the present day in application to another woman,--and that she was received by the Society as their "spiritual Mother." Later we find that from "the light and power of God which attended her ministry, she was received and acknowledged as the first _Mother_ or spiritual parent, in the line female; and the second heir in the Covenant of Life, according to the present display of the Gospel." Even to this day, she is called by her few remaining followers "The Mother;" but she herself always claimed a yet higher and, to sober thought, blasphemous title, saying of herself on many occasions, "I am Anne, _the Word._" She was not an American by birth, but came to this country in 1774, attended by a few followers who believed in her pretensions,--her husband, Abraham Stanley, being among them, and on our shore attained fame and following. On the voyage, the ship as we are told with much gravity, though the tale is hardly original--sprang a leak and was in grave peril of sinking; but the "Mother" put her own hands to the pumps, and under her supernatural force the water was soon ejected. Anne remained in New York about two years and then went to Nisqueuna; where she spent the remainder of her life amid her worshippers, save that, in 1781, she made a progress through several parts of the country, particularly New England, and was received with scorn by some and worship by others. She died at Nisqueuna in 1784, having in her brief residence in our country attained a notoriety which remained, in its way, unequalled for more than a century. The estimate in which she was held may best be judged from the concluding stanza of a "poem," written by one of her enthusiastic followers: "How much they are mistaken who think that Mother's dead, When through her ministrations so many souls are fed! In union with the Father, she is the second Eve, Dispensing full salvation to all who do believe." Thus, in almost all ways,--in her title, in her assumption of a nature, but little, if at all, lower than that of the Deity, and in the devotion with which she inspired her followers,--Anne Lee was the prototype of the most notable woman of our day in America. But Anne Lee is now, a brief century after her death, held in memory only by a few uninfluential and rapidly lessening people; and in this also she may prove the true prototype.