Beecher, who had his stiff gray hair cropped short all over
his head, made a call at our house one afternoon. While he
was waiting for my mother to come down, the little fellow
came into the room and took a look up at the doctor, and then
trotted round to the other side and looked up at him again.
He said, "I think, sir, you look like Apollyon."

The doctor was infinitely amused at being compared to the
personage of whom, in his own opinion and that of a good many
other good people, he was then the most distinguished living
antagonist.

The church was an old-fashioned wooden building, painted yellow,
of Dutch architecture, with galleries on three sides, and
on the fourth a pulpit with a great sounding-board over it,
into which the minister got by quite a high flight of stairs.
Just below the pulpit was the deacons' seat, where the four
deacons sat in a row. The pews were old-fashioned square,
high pews, reaching up almost to the top of the head of a
boy ten years old when he was standing up.

The seats were without cushions and with hinges. When the
people stood up for prayer the seats were turned up for greater
convenience of standing, and when the prayer ended they came
down all over the church with a slam, like a small cannonade.

One Sunday, in the middle of the sermon, the old minister,
Doctor Ripley, stood up in the pulpit and said in a loud
voice, "Simeon, come here. Take your hat and come here."
Simeon was a small boy who lived in the doctor's family and
sat in the gallery. We boys all supposed that Simeon had
been playing in church, or had committed some terrible offence
for which he was to be punished in sight of the whole congregation.

Simeon came down trembling and abashed, and the doctor told
him to go home as fast as he could and get the Thanksgiving
Proclamation. The doctor filled up the time as well he could
with an enormously long prayer, until the boy got back. Simeon
confessed to some of the boys that he had been engaged in
some mischief just before he was called, and he was terribly
afraid the doctor had caught him.

This old church with its tower, yellow spire, old clock and
weathercock, seems to me as I look back on it to have been
a very attractive piece of architecture. It was that church
which suggested to Emerson the leading thought in one of
his most famous poems, "The Problem."

In those days, when people were to be married the law required
notice to be given of their i