"Sacred place," says she. "Oh, Phœmie, you will be the death of me."
"Have you no regard for your own soul?" says I, in an austere whisper that ought to have riled up the depths of her conscience.
"My soul, indeed!" says she, with her eyes and her lips all a-quivering with fun; "as if people ever thought of such things here."
I dropped into my seat—her sinful levity took away my breath.
The woman absolutely began to talk out loud, and didn't even stop when a man got up in the congregation and began to exhort. In the distress her conduct gave me I did not hear just what he said, but at last he held out a paper. A handsome little boy came up and carried it toward the pulpit and gave it to one of the deacons.
Up to this time I had thought the congregation Presbyterians, but the boy puzzled me. I remembered the little fellow in red at that High Church service, and thought perhaps the good old New England stand-by meeting had got some of these new-fangled additions to their board of deacons. The thought troubled me, but not so much as the conduct of that congregation. The ladies in the gallery behaved shamefully—I must say it. They whispered, they laughed, they flirted their fans and flirted with their lips and eyes. Sometimes they turned their backs on the congregation downstairs. They kept moving about from one seat to another. In fact, I cannot describe the actions of these females. The idea of piety never entered one of their heads—I am sure of that.
There must have been a good many notices and publishments to give out; more than I ever heard of in our meeting-house, for ever so many papers were sent up to the pulpit, where another minister sat now ready to begin his sermon.
I must own it, there was some confusion among the congregation in the body of the church. The members moved about more than was decorous, and there was whispering a-going on there as well.
In Vermont the minister would have rebuked his congregation—especially the flighty females around me.
I was saying this to Cousin E. E. when that man in the pulpit took up a little wooden hammer that lay on the desk before him, and struck it down with a force that hushed the whole congregation into decency at once.