f the hedge
and hurrying along over the undiscerned footway;--it was a novel
experience for one who had been all her life so tended and sheltered as
she. It was strange and disagreeable. Waymarks did not seem familiar;
distances seemed long. Eleanor wished the walk would come to an end.

It did at last. The people,--there was a stream of them now pouring
along the road, indeed so many that Eleanor was greatly surprised at
them,--turned off into a field, within which at a few rods from the
road stood the barn in question; at the door of which one or two lamps
hung out shewed that something unusual was going on there. Mr. Brooks
had several barns, the gables and roofs of which looked like a little
settlement in the starlight, not far off; but this particular barn
stood alone, and was probably known to the country people from former
occasions; for they streamed towards it and filed in without any
wavering or question. So Eleanor followed, trembling and wondering at
herself; passed the curtain that hung at the door, and went in with the
others.

The place that received them was a great threshing-floor, of noble
proportions, for a threshing-floor. Perhaps Mr. Brooks had an eye to
contingencies when he built it. On two sides it was lined with grain,
rising in walls of cereal sweetness to a great height; and certainly,
if Eleanor had been in many a statelier church, she had never been in
one better ventilated or where the air was more fragrantly scented. But
a new doubt struck her. Could it be right to hold divine service in
such a place? Was this a fit or decorous temple, for uses of such high
and awful dignity? The floor was a bare plank floor; footfalls echoed
over it. The roof was high indeed; but no architect's groining of beams
reminded one that the place was set apart to noble if not sacred
purposes. Nothing but common carpenter's joinery was over her head, in
the roof of the barn. The heads of wheat ears instead of carved
cornices and pendents; and if the lights were dim, which they certainly
were, it did not seem at all a religious light. Only at the further
end, where a table and chair stood ready for the preacher, some tall
wax candles threw a sufficient illumination for all present to see him
well. Was that his pulpit? What sort of preaching could possibly be had
from it?

Eleanor looked round the place. There was no really lighted part of it
except about that table and chair. It was impossible for people to see