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Often the sturdy young blacksmith was at the meeting-house, before the women, and waiting to take their horses. One Sunday, the winter after the Horse-House was built, Mrs. Polly, Ann, Phineas, and Nabby went to meeting as usual. It was a very cold, bleak day; the wind blew in through the slight wooden walls of the old meeting-house, and the snow lay in little heaps here and there.
After the women had dismounted from their pillions at the meeting-house door, the men-folks patiently rode the horses to some place of shelter, and then trudged back through the snow-drifts, wrestling with the icy wind. So this new "Horse-House" was a great benefit to the Waleses, and to the Pennimans, who lived three miles from them over the Stoughton line. They were all constant meeting-folks.
Just at that moment, a man in a gray cloak sprang into the Horse-House, and began untying John Penniman's Red Robin. Ann gave one glance; then she never hesitated. There was no time to send whispers along the pew; to tell Phineas Adams to give the alarm.
Ann's two uncles by adoption, and Thomas Penniman of Stoughton, were well pleased to get this permission to erect a stable, or Horse-House, as they put it then, to shelter their horses during divine worship. The want of one had long been a sore inconvenience to them.
Though they retain their positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their uses, insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the stables are mutable, the horse-house of last week being an office for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a cigar-store, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week.
That, speeding out into the clear winter night, he did bear with him a better determination in his heart. At all events, there were no more attempts made to rob the new Horse-House at the Braintree meeting-house. Many a Sunday after that, Red Robin stood there peaceful and unmolested. Occasionally, as the years went by, he was tied, of a Sunday night, in Mrs. Polly Wales' barn.
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