Something is written elsewhere of the graveyard luncheons they took in the Sunday noonings. Those were the times when the minister worked by the day. The Sunday school in the morning, for the lambs led off the flock. Then a hymn on both sides of the threshold of prayer, and a little carpet of Scripture laid down before it. The preacher would read the hymn, and say, "Sing five verses;" and if he did not happen to put up the bars in this way across the narrow lane of praise, the choir were bound to sing it through, if it was as long as "The Ancient Mariner." Then the sermon, wherein there was a world of scoring and hewing, and showers of chips that hit people here and there, and the work was laid out generally. Then another hymn, the prayer and the benediction. This took till high noon. Then afternoon, wherein the morning's frame was put together, mortise and tenon each adjusted in its own place, raised, roofed and sided, and a doctrine or so put into it to keep house.
The afternoon was the forenoon over again, except that the grandest of all mere human breaths of praise, the Doxology, was sung, and "the disciples went out." The congregation always stood when the clergyman called upon the name of the Lord; and sometimes he called a long time, and occasionally a feeble body, and now and then a lazy one, went down like a forest before a mighty wind! Is there any becoming posture in public prayer between kneeling and standing? Is it not either the one extreme or the other? To see a congregation with their heads every way, like a field of barley after a hail-storm, does not inspire a sentiment of reverence; but a people rising to their feet as one man is an impressive act of homage. Then the Bible class was chinked in somewhere between songs and sermons, and the conference-meeting came in the evening, and held till nine o'clock. For a day of rest, the old-fashioned Sunday was about as busy as a meadow full of hands with the hay down and a storm coming!
Once in four weeks was covenant-meeting. It occurred on Saturday afternoons, began at one, and lasted till four or five. The little boys of good people in the writer's childhood had to go to covenant-meeting. The writer's parents were good people, and _he_ went. The reader is requested to remember that Saturday afternoon was the old-time holiday--the only day in the week when the small animal, man, could kick up its heels with the halter off. There is no recollection more vivid and more painful than of those tremendous Saturday afternoons. I had heard of Joshua, and I couldn't persuade myself that he was dead, though I wickedly hoped he was, for somebody must have commanded the sun "to stand still," and it obeyed.