straight before him when preaching, was jokingly said to have "looked-off"
the bell-rope, when it fell with a crash in the middle of his church.

At the first sound of the drum or horn or bell the town inhabitants issued
from their houses in "desent order," man and wife walking first, and the
children in quiet procession after them. Often a man-servant and a maid
walked on either side of the heads of the family. In some communities the
congregation waited outside the church door until the minister and his wife
arrived and passed into the house; then the church-attendants followed, the
loitering boys always contriving to scuffle noisily in from the horse-sheds
at the last moment, making much scraping and clatter with their heavy boots
on the sanded floor, and tumbling clumsily up the uucarpeted, creaking
stairs.

In other churches the members of the congregation seated themselves in
their pews upon their arrival, but rose reverently when the parson, dressed
in black skull-cap and Geneva cloak, entered the door; and they stood, in
token of respect, until after he entered the pulpit and was seated.

It was also the honor-giving and deferential custom in many New England
churches, in the eighteenth century, for the entire congregation to remain
respectfully standing within the pews at the end of the serice until the
minister had descended from his lofty pulpit, opened the door of his wife's
pew, and led her with stately dignity to the church-porch, where, were he
and she genial and neighborly minded souls, they in turn stood and greeted
with carefully adjusted degrees of warmth, interest, respect, or patronage,
the different members of the congregation as they slowly passed out.