She folded and smoothed her undergarments with her hands and then sat on them for a specified time.

We all followed her example and thus utilized the hours devoted to our French lessons and, while reading "Corinne" and "Telemaque," in this primitive style we ironed our clothes.

But for dresses, collars and cuffs, and pocket handkerchiefs, we were compelled to wield the hot iron, hence with these articles we used all due economy, and my mother's object was thus accomplished.
As I had become sufficiently philosophical to talk over my religious experiences calmly with my classmates who had been with me through the Finney revival meetings, we all came to the same conclusion--that we had passed through no remarkable change and that we had not been born again, as they say, for we found our tastes and enjoyments the same as ever.

My brother-in-law explained to us the nature of the delusion we had all experienced, the physical conditions, the mental processes, the church machinery by which such excitements are worked up, and the impositions to which credulous minds are necessarily subjected.

As we had all been through that period of depression and humiliation, and had been oppressed at times with the feeling that all our professions were arrant hypocrisy and that our last state was worse than our first, he helped us to understand these workings of the human mind and reconciled us to the more rational condition in which we now found ourselves.