Among the ancient customs of New England and its colonies (of which Brooklyn is one) is the Friday-evening prayer-meeting.  Some of our readers, perhaps, have dismal recollections of their early compelled attendance on those occasions, when, with their hands firmly held in the maternal grasp, lest at the last moment they should bolt under cover of the darkness, they glided round into the back parts of the church, lighted by one smoky lantern hung over the door of the lecture-room, itself dimly lighted, and as silent as the adjacent chambers of the dead.  Female figures, demure in dress and eyes cast down, flitted noiselessly in, and the awful stillness was only broken by the heavy boots of the few elders and deacons who constituted the male portion of the exceedingly slender audience.  With difficulty, and sometimes, only after two or three failures, a hymn was raised, which, when in fullest tide, was only a dreary wail,—­how unmelodious to the ears of unreverential youth, gifted with a sense of the ludicrous!  How long, how sad, how pointless the prayers!  How easy to believe, down in that dreary cellar, that this world was but a wilderness, and man “a feeble piece”!  Deacon Jones could speak up briskly enough when he was selling two yards of shilling calico to a farmer’s wife sharp at a bargain; but in that apartment, contiguous to the tombs, it seemed natural that he should utter dismal views of life in bad grammar through his nose.  Mrs. Jones was cheerful when she gave her little tea-party the evening before; but now she appeared to assent, without surprise, to the statement that she was a pilgrim travelling through a vale of tears.  Veritable pilgrims, who do actually meet in an oasis of the desert, have a merry time of it, travellers tell us.  It was not so with these good souls, inhabitants of a pleasant place, and anticipating an eternal abode in an inconceivably delightful paradise.  But then there was the awful chance of missing it!  And the reluctant youth, dragged to this melancholy scene, who avenged themselves by giving select imitations of deaconian eloquence for the amusement of young friends,—­what was to become of them?  It was such thoughts, doubtless, that gave to those excellent people their gloomy habit of mind; and if their creed expressed the literal truth respecting man’s destiny, character, and duty, terror alone was rational, and laughter was hideous and defiant mockery.  What room in a benevolent heart for joy, when a point of time, a moment’s space removed us to that heavenly place, or shut us up in hell?

From the time when we were accustomed to attend such meetings, long ago, we never saw a Friday-evening meeting till the other night, when we found ourselves in the lecture-room of Plymouth Church.