(from John Woolman's Journal)._

XXIX. FIERCE FEATHERS

The sunlight lay in patches on the steep roof of the Meeting-house of
Easton Township, in the County of Saratoga, in the State of New York.
It was a bright summer morning in the year 1775. The children of
Easton Township liked their wooden house, although it was made only of
rough-hewn logs, nailed hastily together in order to provide some sort
of shelter for the worshipping Friends. They would not, if they could,
have exchanged it for one of the more stately Meeting-houses at home
in England, on the other side of the Atlantic. There, the windows were
generally high up in the walls. English children could see nothing
through the panes but a peep of sky, or the topmost branches of a tall
tree. When they grew tired of looking in the branches of the tree for
an invisible nest that was not there, there was nothing more to be
hoped for, out of those windows. The children's eyes came back inside
the room again, as they watched the slow shadows creep along the
white-washed walls, or tried to count the flies upon the ceiling. But
out here in America there was no need for that. The new Meeting-house
of Easton had nearly as many possibilities as the new world outside.
To begin with, its logs did not fit quite close together. If a boy or
girl happened to be sitting in the corner seat, he or she could often
see, through a chink, right out into the woods. For the untamed
wilderness still stretched away on all sides round the newly-cleared
settlement of Easton.

Moreover, there were no glass windows in the log house as yet, only
open spaces provided with wooden shutters that could be closed, if
necessary, during a summer storm. Another larger, open space at one
end of the building would be closed by a door when the next cold
weather came. At present the summer air met no hindrance as it blew in
softly, laden with the fragrant scents of the flowers and pine-trees,
stirring the children's hair as it lightly passed. Every now and then
a drowsy bee would come blundering in by mistake, and after buzzing
about for some time among the assembled Friends, he would make his
perilous way out again through one of the chinks between the logs. The
children, as they sat in Meeting, always hoped that a butterfly might
also find its way in, some fine day--before the winter came, and
before the window spaces of the new Meeting-house had to be filled
with glass, and a doo