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A town meeting was therefore called Jan. 8, 1795, to choose a committee to purchase the land agreed upon; but at the meeting the town refused to choose such a committee, and so ended the plan of building a meeting-house there.

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.

The meeting-house which our boy remembers was a high, square building, without a steeple. Within it had a lofty pulpit, with doors underneath and closets where sacred things were kept, and where the tithing-men were supposed to imprison bad boys.

The inhabitants are very much dependent on the visitors who resort thither during the three summer months, and amongst whom may frequently be reckoned some of the first families in Europe. The meeting-house stands in one of the allées, and although its position is not central, it is sufficiently public to be an object of attraction to the curiosity of strangers.

He had belonged to one of the ancient families of the region, long settled on this old farm by the narrow river; they had given their name to a bridge, and the bridge had christened the meeting-house which stood close by. We were much struck by the solemn figure of the mother, a very old woman, as she walked toward her old home with some of her remaining children.

The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms. The ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central fane undisturbed.

Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.

Near the west end of the Lower Mall is the Friends' Meeting House, a small brick building which, though new, inherits an old tradition; for there is said to have been a meeting-house here from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and one of the meetings was disturbed and broken up by Cromwell's soldiers. At the back is a small burial-ground, in which the earliest stone bears date 1795.

Aaron Putnam, a prayer by your papa also. Putnam who is the president of the day, and all the gentlemen are to dine at Seton's Hall, otherwise called Massachusetts Hall, and the ladies are to take tea at the same place. The Jacobins are to have an oration at the Baptist meeting-house from Mr. Gleson. I know nothing more about them.

The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself, the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat roof and battlements," a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned pounds, and carefully expended.