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.

At noon was Sunday-school, and after that, before the afternoon service, in summer, the boys had a little time to eat their luncheon together at the watering-trough, where some of the elders were likely to be gathered, talking very solemnly about cattle; or they went over to a neighboring barn to see the calves; or they slipped off down the roadside to a place where they could dig sassafras or the root of the sweet-flag, roots very fragrant in the mind of many a boy with religious associations to this day.  There was often an odor of sassafras in the afternoon service.  It used to stand in my mind as a substitute for the Old Testament incense of the Jews.  Something in the same way the big bass-viol in the choir took the place of “David’s harp of solemn sound.”