es flew and twittered at will; and a huge stove, with branching
pipes, stood in the naked aisle. The pews were hard and prim, and
occupied by pinch-visaged people; the pulpit was a plain shelf, with
hanging oil-lamps on either side; and over the door in the rear
projected a rheumatic gallery, where the black communicants were boxed
up like criminals. A kind old woman gave Paul a ginger-cake, but his
father motioned him to put it in his pocket; and after he had warmed
his feet, he was told to sit in the pew nearest the preacher on what
was called the "Amen side." Then the services began, the preacher
leading the hymns, and the cracked voices of the old ladies joining in
at the wrong places. But after a while a venerable negro in the
gallery tuned up, and sang down the shrill swallows with natural
melody. The prayers were long, and broken by ejaculations from the
pews. The text was announced amid profound silence, after everybody
had coughed several times, and then the itinerant launched into his
sermon. At first it was dry and argumentative, then burdened with
divisions and quotations, but in the end he closed the great book, and
made one of those fierce, feeling appeals--brimming with promises of
grace and threatenings of hell--in words so homely that all felt them
true, while the wild, interpolated cries of the believers thrilled and
terrified the young.

Little Paul heard with pale lips these grim, religious revelations,
and his child's fancy conjured up awful pictures of worlds beyond the
grave. He wondered that the birds dared riot in the roof: the sky in
the gable window was full of cloudy marvels; and the snow beat under
the door, like a shroud blown out of one of the churchyard tombs. The
closing prayer was said at last, the unconverted walked away, but five
or six communicants remained to tell their experience in the
class-meeting. Paul's father gave him permission to go into the yard
if he liked, and the boy got into the sulky, beneath the buffalo, and
heard the sobs and hymns floating dismally on the wind. Grim shapes
thronged his mind again, wherein the Bible stories were mingled with
tales of ghosts and strange nursery fables. They chased each other in
and out, generating others as they went, and then came drowsiness, and
Paul slept.

The class-meeting lasted an hour. It was very fervent and
demonstrative; and when it was over the kind old lady who had given
Paul the gingerbread asked the preacher home to