And he glided silently and smoothly into the church.

“There comes Judge Bacon, white and ugly,” said the critical Hiram.  “I wonder what he comes to meetin’ for.  Lord knows he needs it, sly, slippery old sinner!  Face’s as white as a lily; his heart’s as black as a chimney flue afore it’s cleaned.  He’ll get his flue burned out if he don’t repent, that’s certain.  He don’t believe the Bible.  They say he don’t believe in God.  Wal, I guess it’s pretty even between ’em.  Shouldn’t wonder if God didn’t believe in him neither.”

As soon as the afternoon service was over, every horse on the green knew that it was time for him to go home.  Some grew restless and whinnied for their masters.  Nimble hands soon put them into the shafts or repaired any irregularity of harness.  Then came such a scramble of vehicles to the church door for the older persons; while young women and children, venturing further out upon the green, were taken up hastily, that the impatient horses might as soon as possible turn their heads homeward.  Clouds of dust began to arise along every outward-going road.  In less than ten minutes not a wagon or chaise was seen upon the village green.  They were whirling homeward at the very best pace that the horses could raise.  Stiff old steeds vainly essayed a nimbler gait, but gave it up in a few rods, and fell back to the steady jog.  Young horses, tired of long standing, and with a strong yearning for evening oats, shot along the level ground, rushed up the little hills, or down upon the other side, in the most un-Sunday-like haste.  The scene was not altogether unlike the return from a military funeral, to which men march with sad music and slow, but from which they return nimbly marching to the most brilliant quick-step.

In half an hour Norwood was quiet again.  The dinner, on Sunday, when for the sake of the outlying population the two services are brought near together in the middle of the day, was usually deferred till the ordinary supper hour.  It was evident that the tone of the day was changed.  Children were not so strictly held in.  There was no loud talking, nor was laughing allowed, but a general feeling sprung up around the table that the severer tasks of the day were ended.

Devout and age-sobered people sat in a kind of golden twilight of meditation.  The minister, in his well-ordered house, tired with a double service, mingled thoughts both glad and sad.  His tasks were ended.  He was conscious that he had manfully done his best.  But that best doing, as he reflected upon it, seemed so poor, so unworthy of the nobleness of the theme, and so relatively powerless upon the stubborn stuff of which his people’s dispositions were made, that there remained a vague, unquiet sense of blame upon his conscience.