The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square
building, without a steeple. Within it had a lofty pulpit, with
doors underneath and closets where sacred things were kept, and where
the tithing-men were supposed to imprison bad boys. The pews were
square, with seats facing each other, those on one side low for the
children, and all with hinges, so that they could be raised when the
congregation stood up for prayers and leaned over the backs of the
pews, as horses meet each other across a pasture fence. After
prayers these seats used to be slammed down with a long-continued
clatter, which seemed to the boys about the best part of the
exercises. The galleries were very high, and the singers' seats,
where the pretty girls sat, were the most conspicuous of all. To sit
in the gallery away from the family, was a privilege not often
granted to the boy. The tithing-man, who carried a long rod and kept
order in the house, and out-doors at noontime, sat in the gallery,
and visited any boy who whispered or found curious passages in the
Bible and showed them to another boy. It was an awful moment when
the bushy-headed tithing-man approached a boy in sermon-time. The
eyes of the whole congregation were on him, and he could feel the
guilt ooze out of his burning face.

At noon was Sunday-school, and after that, before the afternoon
service, in summer, the boys had a little time to eat their luncheon
together at the watering-trough, where some of the elders were likely
to be gathered, talking very solemnly about cattle; or they went over
to a neighboring barn to see the calves; or they slipped off down the
roadside to a place where they could dig sassafras or the root of the
sweet-flag, roots very fragrant in the mind of many a boy with
religious associations to this day. There was often an odor of