copiously and
summoned up their saddest facial expressions. At the grave came the
sober warnings to the living and sometimes frightful prophesies as to
the state of the dead. All this pageantry of woe and visions of the
unknown land beyond the tomb, often haunted my midnight dreams and
shadowed the sunshine of my days. The parsonage, with its bare walls and
floors, its shriveled mistress and her blind sister, more like ghostly
shadows than human flesh and blood; the two black servants, racked with
rheumatism and odoriferous with a pungent oil they used in the vain hope
of making their weary limbs more supple; the aged parson buried in his
library in the midst of musty books and papers--all this only added to
the gloom of my surroundings. The church, which was bare, with no
furnace to warm us, no organ to gladden our hearts, no choir to lead our
songs of praise in harmony, was sadly lacking in all attractions for the
youthful mind. The preacher, shut up in an octagonal box high above our
heads, gave us sermons over an hour long, and the chorister, in a
similar box below him, intoned line after line of David's Psalms, while,
like a flock of sheep at the heels of their shepherd, the congregation,
without regard to time or tune, straggled after their leader.

Years later, the introduction of stoves, a violoncello, Wesley's hymns,
and a choir split the church in twain. These old Scotch Presbyterians
were opposed to all innovations that would afford their people paths of
flowery ease on the road to Heaven. So, when the thermometer was twenty
degrees below zero on the Johnstown Hills, four hundred feet above the
Mohawk Valley, we trudged along through the snow, foot-stoves in hand,
to the cold hospitalities of the "Lord's House," there to be chilled to
the very core by listening to sermons on "predestination,"
"justification by faith," and "eternal damnation."

To be restless, or to fall asleep under such solemn circumstances was a
sure evidence of total depravity, and of the machinations of the devil
striving to turn one's heart from God and his ordinances. As I was
guilty of these shortcomings and many more, I early believed myself a
veritable child of the Evil One, and suffered endless fears lest he
should come some night and claim me as his own. To me he was a personal,
ever-present reality, crouching in a dark corner of the nursery. Ah! how
many times I have stolen out of bed, and sat shivering on the stairs,
where the