As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day.  According to Hesiod,

              “The seventh is a holy day,
   For then Latona brought forth golden-rayed Apollo,”

and by our reckoning this was the seventh day of the week, and not the first.  I find among the papers of an old Justice of the Peace and Deacon of the town of Concord, this singular memorandum, which is worth preserving as a relic of an ancient custom.  After reforming the spelling and grammar, it runs as follows:  “Men that travelled with teams on the Sabbath, Dec. 18th, 1803, were Jeremiah Richardson and Jonas Parker, both of Shirley.  They had teams with rigging such as is used to carry barrels, and they were travelling westward.  Richardson was questioned by the Hon. Ephraim Wood, Esq., and he said that Jonas Parker was his fellow-traveller, and he further said that a Mr. Longley was his employer, who promised to bear him out.”  We were the men that were gliding northward, this Sept. 1st, 1839, with still team, and rigging not the most convenient to carry barrels, unquestioned by any Squire or Church Deacon and ready to bear ourselves out if need were.  In the latter part of the seventeenth century, according to the historian of Dunstable, “Towns were directed to erect ‘a cage’ near the meeting-house, and in this all offenders against the sanctity of the Sabbath were confined.”  Society has relaxed a little from its strictness, one would say, but I presume that there is not less religion than formerly.  If the ligature is found to be loosened in one part, it is only drawn the tighter in another.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow.  If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.  The geologists tell us that it took one hundred years to prove that fossils are organic, and one hundred and fifty more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.  I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God.  Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove.  He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.  I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal, hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no Sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thum_o*i phyle’ousa’ te, k_edome’n_e te.  The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices