lock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as
best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by
an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass--viol
formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple
song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral
accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still
sat at the end of the pew--a custom which had grown up in the days when
they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should
be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the
drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent
forth their milder call. Behind the meeting-houses were the horse-sheds
for the use of distant comers--a species of ecclesiastical edifice still
adorning the greater number of American country churches, and not likely
to disappear for many a year to come.

In the elder day there was no such difference as now between city and
country churches, for the limitations of money and material bore upon
both more evenly. But with growing wealth and the choice of permanent
locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received
orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his
followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches,
boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London
skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the
English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural
tablets and horizontal tombstones were laid into the mortar which has
been permitted, in not a few cases, to preserve them for our own eyes.

[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL'S, MARBLEHEAD, MASSACHUSETTS.]

But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the
political events with which they have been associated than by the
honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow. Their
connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than
their relations to the dead. Not because it is Boston's Westminster
Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to
us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the
eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which
it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon
its front. The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to