This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun usually, and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been wanted for taking the family to meeting.  It was so peaceful and still in the pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so playful, the colts never so frisky.  Round and round the lot the boy went calling, in an entreating Sunday voice, “Jock, jock, jock, jock,” and shaking his salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect, and shaking tails and flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and gave the boy a pretty good race before he could coax the nose of one of them into his dish.  The boy got angry, and came very near saying “dum it,” but he rather enjoyed the fun, after all.

The boy remembers how his mother’s anxiety was divided between the set of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory of the Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was through the house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept running hither and thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch of caraway-seed.  Already the deacon’s mare, with a wagon-load of the deacon’s folks, had gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, clumsy hoofs kicking up clouds of dust, while the good deacon sat jerking the reins, in an automatic way, and the “womenfolks” patiently saw the dust settle upon their best summer finery.  Wagon after wagon went along the sandy road, and when our boy’s family started, they became part of a long procession, which sent up a mile of dust and a pungent, if not pious smell of buffalo-robes.  There were fiery horses in the trail which had to be held in, for it was neither etiquette nor decent to pass anybody on Sunday.  It was a great delight to the farmer-boy to see all this procession of horses, and to exchange sly winks with the other boys, who leaned over the wagon-seats for that purpose.  Occasionally a boy rode behind, with his back to the family, and his pantomime was always some thing wonderful to see, and was considered very daring and wicked.

The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square building, without a steeple.  Within it had a lofty pulpit, with doors underneath and closets where sacred things were kept, and where the tithing-men were supposed to imprison bad boys.  The pews were square, with seats facing each other, those on one side low for the children, and all with hinges, so that they could be raised when the congregation stood up for prayers and leaned over the backs of the pews, as horses meet each other across a pasture fence.  After prayers these seats used to be slammed down with a long-continued clatter, which seemed to the boys about the best part of the exercises.  The galleries were very high, and the singers’ seats, where the pretty girls sat, were the most conspicuous of all.  To sit in the gallery away from the family, was a privilege not often granted to the boy.  The tithing-man, who carried a long rod and kept order in the house, and out-doors at noontime, sat in the gallery, and visited any boy who whispered or found curious passages in the Bible and showed them to another boy.  It was an awful moment when the bushy-headed tithing-man approached a boy in sermon-time.  The eyes of the whole congregation were on him, and he could feel the guilt ooze out of his burning face.