The ‘meeting-house,’ of large unhewed logs, was a story and a half in hight, and about large enough to seat comfortably a congregation of two hundred persons.  It was covered with shingles, with a roof projecting some four feet over the wall, and was surmounted at the front gable by a tower, about twelve feet square.  This also was built of logs, and contained a bell ‘to call the erring to the house of prayer,’ though, unfortunately, all of that character thereabouts dwelt beyond the sound of its voice.  The building was located at a cross-roads about equally distant from two little hamlets, (the nearest nine miles off,) neither of which was populous enough to singly support a church and a preacher.  The trees in the vicinity had been thinned out, so that carriages could drive into the woods, and find under the branches shelter from the rain and the sun, and at the time of my visit, about twenty vehicles of all sorts and descriptions, from the Colonel’s magnificent barouche to the rude cart drawn by a single two-horned quadruped, filled the openings.  There was a rustic simplicity about the whole scene that charmed me.  The low, rude church, the grand old pines that towered in leafy magnificence around it, and the soft, low wind, that sung a morning hymn in the green, wavy woods, seemed to lift the soul up to Him who inhabiteth eternity, but who also visits 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 me to do, for the truth is, 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.