inhabiteth
eternity, but who deigns to visit the erring children of men.

The preacher was about to "line out" one of Watts' psalms when we
entered the church, but he stopped short on perceiving us, and, bowing
low, waited till we had taken our seats. This action, and the
sycophantic air which accompanied it, disgusted me, and turning to the
Colonel, I asked, jocosely:

"Do the chivalry exact so much obsequiousness from the country clergy?
Do you require to be bowed up to heaven?"

In a low voice, but high enough, I thought, for the preacher to hear,
for we sat very near, the Colonel replied:

"He's a renegade Yankee--the meanest thing on earth."

I said no more, but entered into the services as seriously as the
strange gymnastic performances of the preacher would allow of my doing;
for he was quite as amusing as a circus clown.

With the exception of the Colonel's, and a few other pews in the
vicinity of the pulpit, all of the seats were mere rough benches,
without backs, and placed so closely together as to interfere
uncomfortably with the knees of the sitters. The house was full, and the
congregation as attentive as any I ever saw. All classes were there; the
black serving-man away off by the doorway, the poor white a little
higher up, the small turpentine-farmer a little higher still, and the
wealthy planter, of the class to which the Colonel belonged, on "the
highest seats of the synagogue," and in close proximity to the preacher.

The "man of prayer" was a tall, lean, raw-boned, angular-built
individual, with a thin, sharp, hatchet-face, a small sunken eye, and
long, loose hair, brushed back and falling over the collar of a seedy
black coat. He looked like a dilapidated scare-crow, and his pale,
sallow face, and cracked, wheezy voice, were in odd and comic keeping
with his discourse. His text was: "Speak unto the children of Israel,
that they go forward." And addressing the motley gathering of poor
whites and small planters before him as the "chosen people of God," he
urged them to press on in the mad course their state had taken. It was a
political harangue, a genuine stump-speech, but its frequent allusions
to the auditory as the legitimate children of the old patriarch, and the
rightful heirs of all the promises, struck me as out of place in a
rural district of South Carolina, however appropriate it might have been
in one of the large towns, before an audience of merchants and traders,
who are, almost