orous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives, and the
Authorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So Dr.
Gilman preached, and so they believed.

Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days--you could
tell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changed
the quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses, knew
it: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.
Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their minds
with ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church bells.
You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city suddenly
became full of churches, as though they had magically been let down from
heaven during Saturday night. They must have been there on week days,
but few persons ever thought of them.

Among the many church bells that rang on those bygone Sundays was
that of St. John's, of which Dr. Gilman, of beloved memory, was rector.
Dr. Gilman was a saint, and if you had had the good luck to be baptized
or married or buried by him, you were probably fortunate in an earthly as
well as heavenly sense. One has to be careful not to deal exclusively in
superlatives, and yet it is not an exaggeration to say that St. John's
was the most beautiful and churchly edifice in the city, thanks chiefly
to several gentlemen of sense, and one gentleman, at least, of taste--Mr.
Horace Bentley. The vicissitudes of civil war interrupted its building;
but when, in 1868, it stood completed, its stone unsoiled as yet by
factory smoke, its spire delicately pointing to untainted skies, its rose
window glowing above the porch, citizens on Tower Street often stopped to
gaze at it diagonally across the vacant lot set in order by Mr. Thurston
Gore, with the intent that the view might be unobstructed.

Little did the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings and Prestons and
Atterburys and other prominent people foresee the havoc that prosperity
and smoke were to play with their residential plans! One by one, sooty
commerce drove them out, westward, conservative though they were, from
the paradise they had created; blacker and blacker grew the gothic facade
of St. John's; Thurston Gore departed, but leased his corner first for a
goodly sum, his ancestors being from Connecticut; leased also the vacant
lot he had beautified, where stores arose and hid the spire from Tower
Street. Cable cars moved serenely up the long