Sometimes a little pew or short gallery was built high up among the beams
and joists over the staircase which led to the first gallery, and was
called the "swallows' nest," or the "roof pue," or the "second gallery." It
was reached by a steep, ladder-like staircase, and was often assigned to
the negroes and Indians of the congregation.
Often "ye seat between ye Deacons seat and ye pulpit is for persons hard of
hearing to sett in." In nearly every meeting a bench or pew full of aged
men might be seen near the pulpit, and this seat was called, with Puritan
plainness of speech, the "Deaf Pew." Some very deaf church members (when
the boys were herded elsewhere) sat on the pulpit stairs, and even in the
pulpit, alongside the preacher, where they disconcertingly upturned their
great tin ear-trumpets directly in his face. The persistent joining in the
psalm-singing by these deaf old soldiers and farmers was one of the bitter
trials which the leader of the choir had to endure.
The singers' seats were usually in the galleries; sometimes upon the ground
floor, in the "hind-row on either side." Occasionally the choir sat in two
rows of seats that extended quite across the floor of the house, in front
of the deacons' seat and the pulpit. The men singers then sat facing the
congregation, while the women singers faced the pulpit. Between them ran a
long rack for the psalm-books.
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