across the street, surrounded by rows
of crumbling gravestones carved with quaint epitaphs and heads of
ghastly cherubs, stood the First Church. Any stranger, carried hither
in a magic trunk and asked to name that corner of the world in which he
found himself, would have glanced but once at the four white pillars of
the First Church and once at the venerable City Hall, before answering
that he was in the heart of New England. No one could fail to identify
the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops
whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech
and countenance of many a passer-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings
that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge
piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the
remnants of an earlier civilisation.

As one looked up and down the curving street, the thing that
immediately attracted his attention was a succession of church steeples
or cupolas that broke the roof-lines at almost regular intervals, and
the fashion of these structures left no doubt in the mind that Warwick,
in spite of foreign immigration, was still a stronghold of Puritanism.
All suggestion of Romish or Episcopalian tradition was scrupulously
avoided, even to the omission of the cross and the substitution of a
weather-vane or gamecock. Only one church told a different story. At
some distance north of the City Hall a gothic edifice in brown stone,
with a beautiful square tower of elaborate design, gave a touch of
colour and richness to a vista otherwise somewhat cold and bare. This
was St. George's Church, whose vestry, in the days when it required
some degree of heroism to be an Episcopalian in that uncongenial
atmosphere, had founded St. George's Hall. The present edifice, though
numbering seventy-five years of life, was young compared with the First
Church; and the lapse of time had not served to alter their respective
positions in the community. In Warwick the Episcopalians were still a
small minority; they were still the dissenters of this dissenting
commonwealth.

Around the City Hall, which a pious care had preserved in spite of its
present inadequacy, circled an almost unbroken procession of
trolley-cars; for this point was the very centre of the web of tracks
whose various termini were pegged out here and there in the
neighbouring towns. It might be added that this spot was enshrined in
the heart o