s:

"New England's Sabbath day
Is heaven-like, still, and pure,
When Israel walks the way
Up to the temple's door.
The time we tell
When there to come,
By beat of drum,
Or sounding shell."

The first church at Jamestown, Virginia, gathered the congregation by
beat of drum; but while attendants of the Episcopal, Roman Catholic,
and Dutch Reformed churches in the New World were in general being
summoned to divine service by the ringing of a bell hung either over the
church or in the branches of a tree by its side, New England Puritans
were summoned, as the hymn relates, by drum, or horn, or shell. The
shell was a great conch-shell, and a man was hired to blow it--a
mournful sound--at the proper time, which was usually nine o'clock in
the morning. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the church-shell was
afterwards used for many years as a signal to begin and stop work in the
haying field. In Windsor, Connecticut, a man walked up and down on a
platform on the top of the meeting-house and blew a trumpet to summon
worshippers. Many churches had a church drummer, who stood on the roof
or in the belfry and drummed; a few raised a flag as a summons, or fired
a gun.

Within the meeting-house all was simple enough: raftered walls, puncheon
and sanded or earthen floors, rows of benches, a few pews, all of
unpainted wood, and a pulpit which was usually a high desk overhung by a
heavy sounding-board, which was fastened to the roof by a slender metal
rod. The pulpit was sometimes called a scaffold. When pews were built
they were square, with high partition walls, and had narrow,
uncomfortable seats round three sides. The word was always spelled
"pue"; and they were sometimes called "pits." A little girl in the
middle of this century attended a service in an old church which still
retained the old-fashioned square pews; she exclaimed, in a loud voice,
"What! must I be shut in a closet and sit on a shelf?" These narrow,
shelf-like seats were usually hung on hinges and could be turned up
against the pew-walls during the long psalm-tunes and prayers; so the
members of the congregation could lean against the pew-walls for support
as they stood. When the seats were let down, they fell with a heavy slam
that could be heard half a mile away in the summer time, when the
windows of the meeting-house were open. Lines from an old poem read:--

"And when at last the loud Amen
Fell from aloft, how