Nowhere did the Sunday seem more peaceful than in a sheltered valley in Massachusetts. Beautiful indeed were the thrifty orchards, the rustic farmhouses, the meadows where the charred stumps that marked the last clearing were festooned with running vines, the fields green with Indian corn, and around all the sweep of hills dark with the ancient wood. Even the grim unpainted meeting-house on the hill, which was wont to look the very personification of the rigid Calvinistic theology preached within it, seemed a little less bare and forbidding on that sweet June Sabbath.
As the hour for morning service drew near, the drummer took his accustomed stand before the church and began to thunder forth his summons,a summons not unfitting those stern Puritans whose idea of religion was that of a life-long warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Soon the people began to gather,—grave men and women, dressed in the sober-colored garb of the day, and little children, clad in their "Sunday best," undergoing the awful process of "going to meeting," yet some of them, at least, looking at the cool shadowed wood as they passed, and thinking how pleasant it would be to hunt berries or birds' nests in those sylvan retreats instead of listening to a two hours' sermon, under imminent danger of perdition if they went to sleep,—for in such seductive guise did the Evil One tempt the souls of these youthful Puritans. Solemn of visage and garb were the groups, although here and there the gleam of a bit of ribbon at the throat of some young maiden, or a bonnet tastefully adorned, showed that "the world, the flesh, and
