Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with
unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often
used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge
the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in
Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of
the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As
years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches
became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and
fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which
was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked
live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed
abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great
hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs,
having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said
he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed
with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same
congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great
umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people
sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated
buildings in winter can well be imagined.

Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest
meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and
by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped
from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his
destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear,
which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough.
The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September,
twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story