Except to a young lady Friend, no idea can be given of the impression which the first view, and the subsequent attendances of the yearly meetings, made on Millicent. The silence, the calmness, the order with which several hundreds of Friends, men and women, assembled was something very imposing to a youthful imagination. True, Millicent had seen a simple image of this fuller assembly in the quarterly meetings of her own county; but there she knew almost every individual, their history and connections. There still existed a plainness of manner and of mind, a sort of equality of character and condition, that was familiar to her thoughts. Here came together a class of persons of a position, a wealth, and an education to which she was unaccustomed, and which made her feel as if she were a novice in a higher range of life. The general aspect of the assembly was plain. The men were almost wholly dressed in the peculiar garb and cut of the Society, still, with differences, advancing from the most marked and almost grotesque formality of costume to a very near approach to the fashion, but the plainest fashion, of the outer world. Amongst the women, the distinctions were still more prominent. There was a delightfully neat and pure character of dress throughout the whole female side of the meeting, for the men and women sate separated. A general tendency to dove-colour prevailed in both dresses and bonnets; but the younger portion displayed a smarter tint of colour, even in the dove, and a certain elegance of style, especially in the bonnets, which showed that taste, and even fashion, could no more be excluded from the younger branches of the Friend world, especially the affluent Friend world, than light and air. Youth and beauty would assert their rights as strongly, if unobtrusively, as the more solemn attributes of strong sense, and spiritual development in the older members. Millicent saw with great delight the many charming faces enclosed by the exquisitely neat and often white bonnets. Other young ladies had abandoned the silk bonnet, and assumed straw ones, though of a modest style, and furnished only with the simplest ribbon to tie them with. No gay bows and ultra-fashion makes had yet dared to invade that ancient sanctuary of plainness and worldly abnegation. In our day all that rigid stand by the order in the outward has fallen like the leaves of autumn, and has not reappeared at spring. The Friend has, in a majority of cases, assimilated himself to the world; and it is a still more satisfactory truth, that the world has, in many things, interiorly assimilated itself to the Friend.