1681, while the meeting was held at Thomas Harding's, the owner of the plantation. The property later came into the hands of the Stokes family and has since been known as Stokingham. An Indian village on an elevated site was also within the limits of Thomas Harding's plantation, with a never-failing spring of water hard by. The Indians shared this spring with the Friends, and under the great swamp-magnolia trees which filled the air with fragrance, the latter built their school house, twenty feet square, and within a hundred yards of the spring. It is not many years since some of the trees were still standing, and Indian arrow heads are yet found upon the site. The old graveyard is near by. The present meeting house in the village of Rancocas dates only from 1772, the year of John Woolman's death. There were in Woolman's time about forty meeting houses in the entire province of New Jersey.

The young Woolman must have been a sensitive and sympathetic child, possessed of that priceless gift, a vivid imagination. We can see the little boy of seven, stepping aside from the highroad on his way to school, to sit down and meditate upon the glories of the Holy City, the magnificent description of which in the Book of Revelations had fired his childish thought. The Journal's opening paragraphs show this temperament very clearly, and the way in which the daily walk to school marks for him in after years, the struggles of his early awakened conscience. The incident of the robin's nest is dear to all Woolman lovers.2 The dream which he had when but eight years old must have very deeply impressed him, since he wrote it down at the age of thirtysix, and three times afterwards copied it out at length for the printer. It has, however, been omitted in every previous edition. There is no moral in it, hardly even an end, for it terminates most

1 Charles Stokes: "History of Rancocas Friends' School."

A story told of Abraham Lincoln makes a remarkable parallel to this familiar and oft-quoted anecdote of Woolman. When Lincoln was a lawyer in Springfield, Ill., he was one day going with a party of lawyers to attend court in another town. They rode, two by two, on horseback through a country lane. Lincoln was in the rear. As they passed through a thicket of wild plum and crabapple trees, his friends missed Lincoln. "Where is he?" they asked. Just then Lincoln's companion came riding up. "Oh," replied he, "when I saw him last he had caught two young birds which the wind had blown out of their nest, and he was hunting the nest to put them back." After a little while Lincoln caught up with his friends, and when they rallied him about his tender heart, he said: "I could not have slept if I had not restored those little birds to their mother."

abruptly; yet there it stands-little John Woolman's Dream of the Sun-Worm.

This quality of imagination was no passing thing. At twentyone, left to sleep in the lonely chamber where a Scotch redemptioner, a newly bought servant of his master, had died the night before in delirium, he speaks pathetically of his own timidity and dread of the place in the hours of the night. But a strong will overcame his horror. Is it not to the vivid imagination of John Woolman, by which he was able to visualize in such an amazing degree the situation of his fellow beings, that we owe his peculiar power to enter sympathetically into the needs of all mankind? He spent his life in what was perhaps the most conservative community in the whole of Quakerism, where even the word "imagination" would be a shock to his neighbors; and yet it is that very quality of mind that may well differentiate him from almost every other Quaker journalist of his century.

Of Woolman's education we have only the glimpse of his attendance at the village school; the school house under Friends' care, sheltered the children of the best families in the little community; more than this we do not know. Woolman says of himself, "Having had schooling pretty well for a planter, I used to improve myself in winter evenings, and other leisure times." His father had a good library; the inventory made at Samuel Woolman's death shows that it included works on divinity, navigation and law. There is abundant evidence of the son's wide reading, and of his acquaintance with books which may have had influence upon that style which is the charm of his writing. The literature of Europe was beginning to be more accessible at this period, and the young Woolman grew up at a time of great progress and advancement in the new colony.

The home circle of the family was limited, but at Burlington, where he constantly visited, and where was a group of exceptionally well educated and intelligent Friends, he had the foreign publications at his service. There is abundant evidence that he made the best use of his opportunities. He was very intimate in the family of the historian, Samuel Smith,14 and of his distinguished brother, John,15 son-in-law of James Logan, (16741751) and a founder of the Pennsylvania Hospital. Their friend also, Jonathan Belcher, (1682-1757) Governor of New Jersey,

had removed to Burlington, and his house and library were at Woolman's disposal. Through the efforts of these cultivated men the Burlington Library received its charter in 1757 from King George II. The Library at "Bridgetown" was also chartered eight years after, in 1765. John Woolman's relatives and friends were represented among the original subscribers, but his own name does not appear on either library list. At the date of that in his home town, his scruples as to the literature introduced would have prevented his subscribing.

But he at no time confined his reading exclusively to Quaker literature. He quotes Cave's "Primitive Christianity," Fox's "Acts and Monuments," Thomas à Kempis, and the French quietistic writers in the English translations. Especially did he study those books of travel written by the Jesuit Fathers who explored India and Africa, and they and the agents of the East India Company are frequently quoted.

There are many strong suggestions of Fénelon about the essays, and one has but to read the two together to be convinced that the peculiar literary style of Woolman was gained by no accident. Not that he in any way imitated the French writer, but he was so saturated with the atmosphere and thought of the famous Abbé, whose works at this period were upon the tables of all the best educated Quakers, that the style is reflected in his essays, even to the choice of title. Compare, for instance, Fénelon's "Dissertation on Pure Love," with Woolman's "Essay on Pure Wisdom." It is chiefly in the Essays that one finds reflected the French influence. The identical volume of Thomas Bromley's "Way to the Sabbath of Rest," which was in the library of Elizabeth Smith, 16 the sister of Samuel and John, still exists, and was one of the much admired works then perused by them all.

The first portions of the Abbé Raynal's "Philosophical and Political History of the Europeans in the East and West Indies" appeared in 1755. Doubtless his friend, Anthony Benezet, saw to it that Woolman had the translation. Benezet was a life long correspondent of the famous Abbé. The advance chapters of this book received great attention, as had the same author's "Literary Anecdotes" two years before. Justamond's translation did not appear until 1776. It is interesting to find today in the Ridgway Branch of the Philadelphia Library, some of the works