mer Sunday with such gorgeous
millinery as would have shocked the grave people of thirty years ago.
The deep bass note which once pealed from the belfry with a solemn and
solitary dignity of sound has now lost it all amid the jangle of a
half-dozen bells of lighter and airier twang. Even the parson himself
will not be that grave man of stately bearing, who met the rarest fun
only benignantly, and to whom all the villagers bowed,--but some new
creature full of the logic of the schools and the latest
conventionalisms of manner. The homespun disciples of other days would
be brought grievously to the blush, if some deep note of the old bell
should suddenly summon them to the presence of so fine a teacher,
encompassed with such pretty appliances of upholstery; and, counting
their chances better in the strait path they knew on uncarpeted floors
and between high pews, they would slink back into their graves
content,--all the more content, perhaps, if they should listen to the
service of the new teacher, and, in their common-sense way, reckon what
chance the dapper talker might have,--as compared with the solemn
soberness of the old pastor,--in opening the ponderous doors for them
upon the courts above.

Into this metamorphosed condition the town of Ashfield has possibly
fallen in these latter days; but in the good year 1819, when the
Reverend Benjamin Johns was invited for the first time to fill its
pulpit of an early autumn Sunday, it was still in possession of all its
palmy quietude and of its ancient cheery importance. And to that old
date we will now transfer ourselves.

V.

Every other day the stage-coach comes into Ashfield from the north, on
the Hartford turnpike, and rumbles through the main street of the town,
seesawing upon its leathern thoroughbraces. Just where the pike forks
into the main northern road, and where the scattered farm-houses begin
to group more thickly along the way, the country Jehu prepares for a
triumphant entry by giving a long, clean cut to the lead-horses, and two
or three shortened, sharp blows with his doubled lash to those upon the
wheel; then, moistening his lip, he disengages the tin horn from its
socket, and, with one more spirited "chirrup" to his team and a petulant
flirt of the lines, he gives out, with tremendous explosive efforts, a
series of blasts that are heard all down the street. Here and there a
blind is coyly opened, and some old dame in ruffled cap peers out, or
some st