then another dark brown square, and so on, to represent the accidental differences of shade always noticeable in the real stones of which walls are built.  To be sure, the architect could not help getting his party-colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural chimps know very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and symmetrical figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of throwing a peck of potatoes up into the air and sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens to fall.  The pews of this meeting-house were the usual oblong ones, where people sit close together, with a ledge before them to support their hymn-books, liable only to occasional contact with the back of the next pew’s heads or bonnets, and a place running under the seat of that pew where hats could be deposited,—­always at the risk of the owner, in case of injury by boots or crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a divine of the “Liberal” school, as it is commonly called, bred at that famous college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years ago, to have the monopoly of training young men in the milder forms of heresy.  His ministrations were attended with decency, but not followed with enthusiasm.  “The beauty of virtue” got to be an old story at last.  “The moral dignity of human nature” ceased to excite a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions.  It grew to be a dull business, this preaching against stealing and intemperance, while he knew very well that the thieves were prowling round orchards and empty houses, instead of being there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards, being rarely church-goers, get little good by the statistics and eloquent appeals of the preacher.  Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up a little; but it was a languid congregation, at best,—­very apt to stay away from meeting in the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening services.  The minister, unlike his rival of the other side of the way, was a down-hearted and timid kind of man.  He went on preaching as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings at times.  There was a little Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his own was placed, which he always had to pass on Sundays.  He could never look on the thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in among them and go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which makes a worshipping throng as different from the same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered cinders.