flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of
their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with
their sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England
meeting-house. It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out
of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its
summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery
running round three sides of the building. On the fourth side the
pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it. Here preached
the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., successor, after a number of
generations, to the office and the parsonage of the Reverend Didymus
Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged heresies.
He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally delivered a
discourse which was considered by the hard-headed theologians of his
parish to have settled the whole matter fully and finally, so that now
there was a good logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which might
begin at once upon the platform of his demonstrations. Yet the Reverend
Dr. Honeywood was fonder of preaching plain, practical sermons about the
duties of life, and showing his Christianity in abundant good works among
his people. It was noticed by some few of his flock, not without
comment, that the great majority of his texts came from the Gospels, and
this more and more as he became interested in various benevolent
enterprises which brought him into relations with-ministers and
kindhearted laymen of other denominations. He was in fact a man of a
very warm, open, and exceedingly human disposition, and, although bred by
a clerical father, whose motto was "Sit anima mea cum Puritanis," he
exercised his human faculties in the harness of his ancient faith with
such freedom that the straps of it got so loose they did not interfere
greatly with the circulation of the warm blood through his system. Once
in a while he seemed to think it necessary to come out with a grand
doctrinal sermon, and them he would lapse away for a while into preaching
on men's duties to each other and to society, and hit hard, perhaps, at
some of the actual vices of the time and place, and insist with such
tenderness and eloquence on the great depth and breadth of true Christian
love and charity, that his oldest deacon shook