passed some squalid huts of free negroes; and when, after an hour, they came to a grim, solitary hill, the snow began to fall.  It beat down very fast, whitening the frozen furrows in the fields, making pyramids of the charred stumps, and bleaching the sinuous “worm-fences” which bordered the road.  After a while, they found a gate built across the way, and Paul leaped out to open it.  The snow was deep on the other side, and the little fellow’s strength was taxed to push it back; but he succeeded, and his father applauded him.  Then there were other gates; for there were few public highways here, and the routes led through private fields.  It seemed that he had opened a great many gates before they came to the forest, and then Paul wrapped his chilled wet feet in the thick buffalo hide, and watched the dreary stretches of the pines moan by, the flakes still falling, and the wheels of the sulky dragging in the drifts.  The road was very lonely; his father hummed snatches of hymns as they went, and the little boy shaped grotesque figures down the dim aisles of the woods, and wondered how it would be with travellers lost in their depths.  He was not sorry when they reached the meeting-house—­a black old pile of planks, propped upon logs, with a long shelter-roof for horses down the side of the graveyard.  A couple of sleighs, a rough-covered wagon, called a “dearbourn,” and several saddled horses, were tied beneath the roof.  Two very aged negroes were seen coming up one of the cross-roads, and the shining, surging Chesapeake, bearing a few pale sails, was visible in the other direction.  Some boors were gossiping in the churchyard, slashing their boots with their riding-whips; one lean, solemn man came out to welcome the preacher, addressing him as “Brother Bates;” and another led the sulky into the wagon-shed, and treated Bob to some ears of corn, which he needed very much.

Then they all repaired to the church, which looked inside like a great barn.  The beams and shingles were bare; some swallows in the eaves flew and twittered at will; and a huge stove, with branching pipes, stood in the naked aisle.  The pews were hard and prim, and occupied by pinch-visaged people; the pulpit was a plain shelf, with hanging oil-lamps on either side; and over the door in the rear projected a rheumatic gallery, where the black communicants were boxed up like criminals.  A kind old woman gave Paul a ginger-cake, but his father motioned him to put it in his pocket; and after he had warmed his feet, he was told to sit in the pew nearest the preacher on what was called the “Amen side.”  Then the services began, the preacher leading the hymns, and the cracked voices of the old ladies joining in at the wrong places.  But after a while a venerable negro in the gallery tuned up, and sang down the shrill swallows with natural melody.  The prayers were long, and broken by ejaculations from the pews.  The text was announced amid profound silence, after everybody had coughed several times,