his head, and wished he
had shown as much interest when he was preaching, three Sabbaths back, on
Predestination, or in his discourse against the Sabellians. But he was
sound in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside at the council
held in the town of Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which
expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical doctrines? As presiding
officer, he did not vote, of course, but there was no doubt that he was
all right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him, and that couldn't
very well let him go wrong.

The meeting-house on the other and opposite summit was of a more modern
style, considered by many a great improvement on the old New England
model, so that it is not uncommon for a country parish to pull down its
old meeting-house, which has been preached in for a hundred years or so,
and put up one of these more elegant edifices. The new building was in
what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles and
crockets and other ornaments were, like the body of the building, all of
pine wood,--an admirable material, as it is very soft and easily worked,
and can be painted of any color desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed
in imitation of stone,--first a dark brown square, then two light brown
squares, then another dark brown square, and so on, to represent the
accidental differences of shade always noticeable in the real stones of
which walls are built. To be sure, the architect could not help getting
his party-colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those
of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and
serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural chimps know
very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and symmetrical
figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of throwing a peck of
potatoes up into the air and sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens
to fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the usual oblong ones,
where people sit close together, with a ledge before them to support
their hymn-books, liable only to occasional contact with the back of the
next pew's heads or bonnets, and a place running under the seat of that
pew where hats could be deposited,--always at the risk of the owner, in
case of injury by boots or crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a divine
of the "Liberal" school, as it is commonly called, bred at th