The second and less noted of the two women religious leaders who will find record in this chapter was Jemima Wilkinson, who was born in Rhode Island in 1753, thus being a native American. When she was about twenty-three years old she was taken seriously ill, and during the illness suffered from suspended animation. Of this circumstance she took advantage by giving out that she had been dead, and that during her absence from the world she had been invested with divine attributes and authority to instruct mankind in religion. By virtue of her delegated powers she professed to be able to foretell the future, to discern the secrets of the heart, and to have the power to cure any disease; and, as is generally the case with such impostors, failure to heal was accounted for by want of faith in the uncured individual. All these pretensions have a familiar sound, and the present century cannot boast a great--or at least universal--advance in such matters beyond its predecessors; but Jemima made a dangerous innovation, not adopted by her rivals ancient and modern, when she professed to be able to work miracles and offered to demonstrate her powers in this respect by walking upon water. A frame was constructed on the banks of Seneca Lake, and a crowd assembled to see the test; but the matter ended in absurdity, for the prophetess, on driving up in an elegant carriage, descended to the shore and entered the lake to the depth of her ankles; then, turning to the assembled people, she inquired if they had faith that she could accomplish the miracle, since without that faith she could do nothing of herself. She received unanimous answer in the affirmative; whereupon, rather logically than effectively, she replied that in that case there was no need for her to perform the miracle, and incontinently returned to her carriage and drove away! This was ingenious, but hardly convincing, one would think; yet Jemima lost little, if any, of her prestige by this fiasco. She was called by her followers "The Universal Friend," perhaps with double meaning, since she was educated by the Friends, and in some ways professed the tenets of their sect,--and in 1790 led a small but enthusiastic band of worshippers to a tract in western New York, near Penn Van, where, at a place called Jerusalem, the inspired prophetess and thaumaturgist died in 1819. As late as 1850 some of her credulous followers still existed, but they are now practically extinct. Though neither of these women exercised any formative effect upon the American woman of the present, they were typical of a certain class of perverted femininity, and remarkable in their resemblance to later idols of their kind, and are thus worthy of chronicle. They are well cleared from our way, however, and we may turn to more pleasant themes in the story of the truer representatives of American womanhood of the mid-eighteenth century.