and seated with them; but in nearly all towns the negroes had seats by
themselves. The black women were all seated on a long bench or in an
inclosed pew labelled "B.W.," and the negro men in one labelled "B.M." One
William Mills, a jesting soul, being asked by a pompous stranger where he
could sit in meeting, told the visitor that he was welcome to sit in Bill
Mills's pew, and that it was marked "B.M." The man, who chanced to be
ignorant of the local custom of marking the negro seats, accepted the kind
invitation, and seated himself in the black men's pew, to the delight of
Bill Mills, the amusement of the boys, the scandal of the elders, and his
own disgust.

Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
the negroes and Indians of the congregation.

Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.

The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front