She came to church with a look of perfect resignation on the
Sabbath of the stove's introduction, and swept past the unwelcome intruder
with averted head, and into her pew. She sat there through the service,
growing paler with the unaccustomed heat, until the minister's words about
"heaping coals of fire" brought too keen a sense of the overwhelming and
unhealthful stove-heat to her mind, and she fainted. She was carried out of
church, and upon recovering said languidly that it "was the heat from the
stove." A most complete and sudden resuscitation was effected, however,
when she was informed of the fact that no fire had as yet been lighted in
the new church-furnishing.
Similar chronicles exist about other New England churches, and bear a
striking resemblance to each other. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in an address
delivered in New York on December 20, 1853, the anniversary of the Landing
of the Pilgrims, referred to the opposition made to the introduction of
stoves into the old meeting-house in Litchfield, Connecticut, during the
ministry of his father, and gave an amusing account of the results of the
introgression. This allusion called up many reminiscences of anti-stove
wars, and a writer in the "New York Enquirer" told the same story of the
fainting woman in Litchfield meeting, who began to fan herself and at
length swooned, saying when she recovered "that the heat of the horrid
stove had caused her to faint.
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