Another pastime and source of interest to the children in many old churches
was the study of the knots and veins in the unpainted wood of which the
pews and galleries were made. Age had developed and darkened and rendered
visible all the natural irregularities in the wood, just as it had brought
out and strengthened the dry-woody, close, unaired, penetrating scent which
permeated the meeting-house and gave it the distinctive "church smell." The
children, and perhaps a few of the grown people, found in these clusters
of knots queer similitudes of faces, strange figures and constellations,
which, though conned Sunday after Sunday until known by heart, still seemed
ever to show in their irregular groupings a puzzling possibility of the
discovery of new configurations and monstrosities.

The dangling, dusty spiders' webs afforded, too, an interesting sight and
diversion for the sermon-hearing, but not sermon-listening, young Puritans,
who watched the cobwebs swaying, trembling, forming strange maps of
imaginary rivers with their many tributaries, or outlines of intersecting
roads and lanes. And if little Yet-Once, Hate-Evil, or Shearjashub chanced,
by good fortune, to be seated near a window where a crafty spider and a
foolish buzzing fly could be watched through the dreary exposition and
attempted reconciliation of predestination and free will, that indeed were
a happy way of passing the weary hours.




II.

The Church Militant.