Occasionally the town's ladder and poles and hooks and cedar-buckets were
kept in the meeting-house, and thus were handy for Sunday fires.
Sometimes armed men, bearing rumors of wars and of hostile attacks, rode
clattering up to the church-door, and strode with jingling spurs and
rattling swords into the excited assembly with appeal for more soldiers to
bear arms, or for more help for those already in the army, and the whole
congregation felt it no interruption but a high religious privilege and
duty, to which they responded in word and deed. On some happy Sabbaths the
armed riders bore good news of great victories, and great was the rejoicing
thereat in prayer and praise in the old meeting-house.
But usually through the Sabbath services, though the quiet was not that
of our modern carpeted, cushioned, orderly churches, but few interrupting
sounds were heard. The cry of a waking infant, the scraping of restless
feet on the sanded floor, the lumbering noise of the motions of a cramped
farmer as he stood up to lean over the pew-door or gallery-rail, the
clatter of an overturned cricket, the twittering of swallows in the
rafters, and in the summer-time the bumping and buzzing of an invading
bumble-bee as he soared through the air and against the walls, were
the only sounds within the meeting-house that broke the monotonous
"thirteenthly" and "fourteenthly" of the minister's sermon.
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