A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was a pretty little Episcopal
church, with a roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained
window, and a trained rector, who read the service with such ventral
depth of utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant letter, that his
own mother would not have known him for her son, if the good woman had
not ironed his surplice and put it on with her own hands.

There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the name of
the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city people in the summer
months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a distinct
ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a table d'hote of some pretensions;
the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech,--a two-story
building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a great smell of
hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored elements,--where
games of checkers were played on the back of the bellows with red and
white kernels of corn, or with beans and coffee, where a man slept in a
box-settle at night, to wake up early passengers,--where teamsters came
in, with wooden-handled whips and coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic
flavor of the atmosphere, and middle-aged male gossips, sometimes
including the squire of the neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange
a question or two about the news, and then fall into that solemn state of
suspended animation which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days produce
in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane does in dogs in the well-known
experiments related by travellers. This bar-room used to be famous for
drinking and storytelling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. That was
when there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind the bar, and a
hissing vessel of hot water ready, to make punch, and three or four
loggerheads (long irons clubbed at the end) were always lying in the fire
in the cold season, waiting to be plunged into sputtering and foaming