I
have seen one "brassen foot-stove" which had the owner's cipher cut out of
the sheet metal, and from the side was hung a wrought brass chain. By this
chain, a century ago, the shining polished brass stove was carried into
church in the hands of a liveried black man, who held it ostentatiously at
arms' length, that neither ash nor scorch might touch his scarlet velvet
breeches. And after he had tucked it under my lady's tiny feet as she sat
in her pew, he retired to his freezing loft high up among the beams,--the
"Nigger Pew,"--where, I am sorry to record, he more than once solaced and
warmed himself with a bottle of "kill-devil" which he had smuggled into
church, until he fell ignominiously asleep and his drunken snores so
disturbed the minister and the congregation, that two tithingmen were
forced to climb the ladder-like staircase and pull him down and out of
the church and to the neighboring tavern to sleep off the effects of the
liquor. For being "a man and a brother" and, above all, in spite of his
petty idiosyncrasies, a very good and cherished servant, he could not be
thrust out into the snow to freeze to death.
But with the extreme Puritan contempt of comfort even foot-stoves were
not always allowed. The First Church of Roxbury, after having one church
edifice destroyed by fire in 1747, prohibited the use of footstoves in
meeting, and the Roxbury matrons sat with frozen toes in their fine new
meeting-house.
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