she took care in a
matronly way of Dorinda, Rozillah's successor, and "behaved."

On the Sundays when we did not go to church because the weather was bad,
or there was no preaching within twenty miles of us, or my mother was
not well, or the roads were impassable with mire or frost, Mary 'Liza
and I learned two questions in the Shorter Catechism, and she learned
the references as well. We also committed a hymn to memory, and five
verses of a psalm. Beyond this, no religious exercise was binding upon
us, and there was a great deal of the day to be got rid of. Mary 'Liza
read the memoirs of _Mary Lothrop_ and _Nathan W. Dickerman_, seated
upright on her cricket at one corner of the chamber fireplace, and in
the evening, if the day were pleasant, took her Bible to Mam' Chloe's
room or even as far as "the quarters," and read aloud to the servants
whole chapters out of Jeremiah and Paul's Epistles. They used to predict
that she would marry a preacher (which, by the way, she did in the
fulness of time, a red-headed widower preacher, with five boys).

I liked to go to church, because I saw there people dressed in their
prettiest clothes, and they sang hymns. Prayers and sermon were
attendant and unavoidable evils. My legs went to sleep, and a big girl
"going on six" was too old to follow suit. We read none but good books
on Sunday. _Little Henry and His Bearer_, _Anna Ross_, and _Helen
Maurice_ were allowed; the memoirs I have named were advised. The
_Fairchild Family_ "partook too much of the nature of fiction to be
quite suitable for Sabbath reading." So Rev. Cornelius Lee, our pastor,
had decided when the doubtful volume was submitted to him. After that,
it was locked up Saturday night, along with _Sandford and Merton_ and
Miss Edgeworth's _Moral Tales_.

I minded the deprivation less after I converted the playhouse into a
family chapel, and held services there on stay-at-home Sundays. My
audience comprised all the small negroes on the place,--about twenty in
number,--and they were willing attendants. A barrel was set, the whole
head up, at the upper end of the room; upon this was my chair. I sat in
it during the singing, and mounted upon it while reading and exhorting.
Subtle reverence, which I could not analyze, held me back from "offering
prayer." What we were doing was only "making believe" after all, and
belief in the All-seeing Eye, the All-hearing Ear, the Judge of idle
words and blasphemous thoughts, was as old a