New England country-livers have as yet been very little inoculated with
the sentiment of beauty; even the doorstep to the church is a wide flat
stone, that shows not a single stroke of the hammer. Within, the
simplicity is even more severe. Brown galleries run around three sides
of the old building, supported by timbers, on which you still trace,
under the stains from the leaky roof, the deep scoring of the woodman's
axe.

Below, the unpainted pews are ranged in square forms, and by age have
gained the color of those fragmentary wrecks of cigar-boxes which you
see upon the top shelves in the bar-rooms of country taverns. The
minister's desk is lofty, and has once been honored with a coating of
paint;--as well as the huge sounding-board, which to your great
amazement protrudes from the wall at a very dangerous angle of
inclination over the speaker's head. As the Squire's pew is the place of
honor to the right of the pulpit, you have a little tremor yourself at
sight of the heavy sounding-board, and cannot forbear indulging in a
quiet feeling of relief when the last prayer is said.

There are in the Squire's pew long, faded, crimson cushions, which, it
seems to you, must date back nearly to the commencement of the Christian
era in this country. There are also sundry old thumb-worn copies of Dr.
Dwight's Version of the Psalms of David,--"appointed to be sung in
churches by authority of the General Association of the State of
Connecticut." The sides of Dr. Dwight's Version are, you observe, sadly
warped and weather-stained; and from some stray figures which appear
upon a fly-leaf you are constrained to think, that the Squire has
sometimes employed a quiet interval of the service with reckoning up the
contents of the old stocking-leg at home.