The meeting on Sunday united in those days, as nearly as possible, the whole population of a town,—­men, women, and children.  There was then in a village but one fold and one shepherd, and long habit had made the tendency to this one central point so much a necessity to every one, that to stay away from “meetin,” for any reason whatever, was always a secret source of uneasiness.  I remember in my early days, sometimes when I had been left at home by reason of some of the transient ailments of childhood, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant psalm-singing, the solemn tones of the long prayer, and then to the monotone of the sermon, and then again to the closing echoes of the last hymn, and thought sadly, what if some day I should be left out, when all my relations and friends had gone to meeting in the New Jerusalem, and hear afar the music from the crystal walls.

The arrangement of our house of worship in Oldtown was somewhat peculiar, owing to the fact of its having originally been built as a missionary church for the Indians.  The central portion of the house, usually appropriated to the best pews, was in ours devoted to them; and here were arranged benches of the simplest and most primitive form; on which were collected every Sunday, the thin and wasted remnants of what once was a numerous and powerful tribe.  There were four or five respectable Indian families, who owned comfortable farms in the neighborhood, and came to meeting in their farm-wagons, like any of their white neighbors.

...  Besides our Indian population, we had also a few negroes, and a side gallery was appropriated to them.  One of them was that of Aunt Nancy Prime, famous for making election-cake and ginger-pop, and who was sent for at all the great houses on occasions of high festivity, as learned in all mysteries relating to the confection of cakes and pies.  A tight, trig, bustling body she, black and polished as ebony, smooth-spoken and respectful, and quite a favorite with everybody.  Nancy had treated herself to an expensive luxury in the shape of a husband,—­an idle, worthless mulatto man, who was owned as a slave in Boston.  Nancy bought him, by intense labors in spinning flax, but found him an undesirable acquisition, and was often heard to declare, in the bitterness of her soul, when her husband returned from his drinking bouts, that she should never buy another nigger, she knew.  Prominent there was the stately form of old Boston Foodah, an African Prince, who had been stolen from the coast of Guinea in early youth, and sold in Boston at some period of antiquity whereto the memory of man runneth not.

* * * * *

=_Maria J. McIntosh, 1815-._= (Manual, p. 484.)

From “Two Pictures.”