psalm. "Freely"
indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation;
since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we
might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship
and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all
equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a
break to the halls of Ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as I
supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high
amenity, the general aesthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in
its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange
long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and
cushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is
distinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more,
to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too
vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to
the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good
greatgrandfather, Alexander Robertson already named, who was nothing if
not Scotch and Presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait
by the elder Jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage
so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the
rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of India
muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the Washington
Square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then
Mayor of the city--I think Mr. Varick.

We progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the
fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were
practically, of a Sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to
enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and I connect
myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose
orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small
unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any
congregation detected by us; doing so, I make out moreover, with a sense
of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "What church do you
go to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of
the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. To which
I must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves
didn't so prepare us f