A few fallen trees, trimmed of their branches and touched with the adze, ranging at convenient distances under the boughs of those along with which they had lately stood up in proud equality, furnished seats for the now rapidly-gathering assemblage.  A rough stage, composed of logs, rudely hewn and crossing each other at right angles, covered, when at a height of sufficient elevation, formed the pulpit from which the preacher was to exhort.  A chair, brought from some cottage in the neighborhood, surmounted the stage.  This was all that art had done to accommodate nature to the purposes of man.

In the body of the wood immediately adjacent, fastened to the overhanging branches, were the goodly steeds of the company; forming, in themselves, to the unaccustomed and inexperienced eye, a grouping the most curious.  Some, more docile than the rest; were permitted to rove at large, cropping the young herbage and tender grass; occasionally, it is true, during the service, overleaping their limits in a literal sense; neighing, whinnying and kicking up their heels to the manifest confusion of the pious and the discomfiture of the preacher.

The hour at length arrived.  The audience was numerous if not select.  All persuasions—­for even in that remote region sectarianism had done much toward banishing religion—­assembled promiscuously together and without show of discord, excepting that here and there a high stickler for church aristocracy, in a better coat than his neighbor, thrust him aside; or, in another and not less offensive form of pride, in the externals of humility and rotten with innate malignity, groaned audibly through his clenched teeth; and with shut eyes and crossed hands, as in prayer, sought to pass a practical rebuke upon the less devout exhibitions of those around him.  The cant and the clatter, as it prevails in the crowded mart, were here in miniature; and Charity would have needed something more than a Kamschatka covering to have shut out from her eyes the enormous hypocrisy of many among the clamorous professors of that faith of which they felt little and knew less.  If she shut her eyes to the sight, their groans were in her ears; and if she turned away, they took her by the elbow, and called her a backslider herself.  Forrester whispered in the ears of Ralph, as his eye encountered the form of Miss Munro, who sat primly amid a flock of venerables—­

“Doesn’t she talk like a book?  Ah, she’s a smart, sweet girl; it’s a pity there’s no better chance for her than Guy Rivers.  But where’s he—­the rascal?  Do you know I nearly got my fingers on his throat last night.  I felt deusedly like it, I tell you.”

“Why, what did he to you?”

“Answered me with such impudence!  I took him for the pedler in the dark, and thought I had got a prize; it wasn’t the pedler, but something worse—­for in my eyes he’s no better than a polecat.”