ed Brattle Street Church in Boston was not
the only one of our sacred edifices to be wounded by cannonballs, for
the exigences of the fight more than once, during the Revolution and
the civil war, brought flame and destruction within the altar-rails of
churches North and South.

The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America has been so recent
that it can show but few historical landmarks. The time-honored
cathedral at St. Augustine, Florida, and the magnificent ruin of the San
Jose Mission near San Antonio, Texas, and one or two weather-stained
little chapels in the North-west, are nearly all the churches that bring
to us the story of the priestly work of the Roman ecclesiastics during
the colonial days.

We have no State Church, and the different Presidents have made a wide
variety of choice in selecting their places of worship in Washington.
St. John's, just opposite the White House, has been the convenient
Sunday home of some of them: others have followed their convictions in
Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian and other churches. But the city of
Washington is itself too young to be able to boast any very ancient
associations in its churches, and few of its temples have been permitted
to record the names of famous occupants during a series of years. Our
whole country, indeed, is a land of many denominations and a somewhat
wandering population; and older cities than Washington have found one
church famous for one event in its history, and another for another,
rather than, in any single building, a series of notable occurrences
running through the centuries. The nearest approach to the record of a
succession of worthies occupying the same church-seats year after year
is to be found in the chronicles of our oldest college-chapels, as, for
instance, at Dartmouth, where the building containing the still-used
chapel dates from 1786. But though poverty and custom unite in making
our colleges conservative, their growth in numbers demands, from time to
time, new and more generous accommodations for public worship; and so
the little buildings of an earlier day are either torn down or kept for
other and more ignoble uses, like Holden Chapel at Harvard. This quaint
little structure was built in 1744, and is now used for
recitation-rooms, but at one period in its career it served as the
workshop of the college carpenter.

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE OLD CHURCH-TOWER, JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA.]

In the years since our grandfath