Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

No vision opened up to Adam's view the prosperous life the future held in store—no still small voice then whispered in his ear that out of this sorrow was to come the grace which made success sit well on him and Eve; and though, as years went by and intercourse became more rare, their now keen interest in Polperro and its people was swallowed up amid the many claims a busy life laid on them both, each noble action done, each good deed wrought, by Adam, and by Eve too, bore on it the unseen impress of that sore chastening through which they now were passing.

Out of the savings which from time to time Adam had placed with Mr. Macey enough was found to pay the passage-money out and keep them from being pushed by any pressing want on landing.

Already, at the nearest church, Adam and Eve had been married, and nothing now remained but to get on board the vessel, which had already dropped down the river and was to sail the following morning, Triggs had volunteered to put them and their possessions safely on board, and Reuben and Joan, with Eve's small personal belongings, were to meet them at the steps, close by which the Mary Jane's boat would be found waiting. The time had come when Adam could lay aside his disguise and appear in much the same trim he usually did when at Polperro.

Joan was the first to spy him drawing near, and holding out both her hands to greet the welcome change she cried, "Thank the Lord for lettin' me see un his ownself wance more!—Awh, Adam! awh, my dear! 't seems as if I could spake to 'ee now and know 'ee for the same agen.—Look to un, Reuben! you don't wonder now what made us all so proud of un at home."

Reuben smiled, but Adam shook his head: the desolation of this sad farewell robbed him of every other power but that of draining to the dregs its bitterness. During the whole of that long day Eve and he had hardly said one word, each racked with thoughts to which no speech gave utterance. Mechanically each asked about the things the other one had brought, and seemed to find relief in feigning much anxiety about their safety, until Triggs, fearing they might outstay their time, gave them a hint it would not do to linger long; and, with a view to their leavetaking being unconstrained, he volunteered to take the few remaining things down to the boat and stow them safely away, adding that when they should hear his whistle given it would be the signal that they must start without delay.

The spot they had fixed on for the starting-place was one but little used and well removed from all the bustle of a more frequented landing. A waterman lounged here and there, but seeing the party was another's fare vouchsafed to them no further interest. The ragged mud-imps stayed their noisy pranks to scrutinize the country build of Triggs's boat, leaving the four, unnoticed, to stand apart and see each in the other's face the reflection of that misery which filled his own.

Parting for ever! no hopes, no expectations, no looking forward, nothing to whisper "We shall meet again"! "Good-bye for ever" was written on each face and echoed in each heart. Words could not soothe that suffering which turned this common sorrow into an individual torture, which each must bear unaided and alone; and so they stood silent and with outward calm, knowing that on that brink of woe the quiver of an eye might overthrow their all but lost control.

The sun was sinking fast; the gathering mists of eventide were rising to shadow all around; the toil of day was drawing to its close; labor was past, repose was near at hand; its spirit seemed to hover around and breathe its calm upon those worn, tried souls. Suddenly a shrill whistle sounds upon their ears and breaks the spell: the women start and throw their arms around each other's necks. Adam stretches his hand out, and Reuben grasps it in his own.

"Reuben, good-bye. God deal with you as you shall deal with those you're going among!"

"Adam, be true to her, and I'll be true to those you leave behind."

"Joan!" and Adam's voice sounds hard and strained, and then a choking comes into his throat, and, though he wants to tell her what he feels, to ask her to forgive all he has made her suffer, he cannot speak a word. Vainly he strives, but not a sound will come; and these two, whose lives, so grown together, are now to be rent asunder, stand stricken and dumb, looking from out their eyes that last farewell which their poor quivering lips refuse to utter.

"God bless and keep you, Eve!" Reuben's voice is saying as, taking her hands within his own, he holds them to his heart and for a moment lets them rest there.—"Oh, friends," he says, "there is a land where partings never come: upon that shore may we four meet again!"

Then for a moment all their hands are clasped and held as in a vice, and then they turn, and two are gone and two are left behind.

And now the two on land stand with their eyes strained on the boat, which slowly fades away into the vapory mist which lies beyond: then Reuben turns and takes Joan by the hand, and silently the two go back together, while Adam and Eve draw near the ship which is to take them to that far-off shore to which Hope's torch, rekindled, now is pointing.

Good-bye is said to Triggs, the boat pushes off, and the two left standing side by side watch it away until it seems a speck, which suddenly is swallowed up and disappears from sight. Then Adam puts his arm round Eve, and as they draw closer together from out their lips come sighing forth the whispered words, "Fare-well! farewell!"

    The Author of "Dorothy Fox".

OUR GRANDFATHERS' TEMPLES

If on the fourteenth day of May, 1607, when the Rev. Robert Hunt celebrated the first sacramental service of the Church of England on American soil, there had suddenly sprung up at Jamestown the pillars and arches of a fully-equipped cathedral, whose stones had remained to tell us of the days when they first enshrined the worship of the earliest colonists, our most ancient Christian church would still be less than three hundred years old—a hopelessly modern structure in comparison with many an abbey and cathedral of England and the Continent.

In a comparative sense, we look in vain for old churches in a new country, for in our architecture, if nowhere else, we are still a land of yesterday, where age seems venerable only when we refuse to look beyond the ocean, and where even a short two hundred years have taken away the larger share of such perishable ecclesiastical monuments as we once had. Our grandfathers' temples, whether they stood on the banks of the James River or on the colder shores of Massachusetts Bay, were built cheaply for a scanty population: their material was usually wood, sometimes unshapen logs, and their sites, chosen before the people and the country had become fitted to each other, were afterward often needed for other uses. So long as London tears down historic churches, even in the present days of fashionable devotion to the old and the quaint, and so long as the Rome of 1880 is still in danger from vandal hands, we need only be surprised that the list of existing American churches of former days is so long and so honorable as it is. If we have no York Minster or St. Alban's Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral, we may still turn to an Old South, a St. Paul's and a Christ Church. It is something, after all, to be able to count our most famous old churches on the fingers of both hands, and then to enumerate by tens those other temples whose legacy from bygone times is scarcely less rich.

The American churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were plain structures, unpretending without and unadorned within; and this for other reasons than the poverty of the community, the lack of the best building-materials, and the absence both of architects and of artistic tastes. It was a simple ritual which most of them were to house, and the absence of an ornate service demanded the absence of ornamentation, which would be meaningless because it would symbolize nothing. The influence of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Baptists in Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in New York, the Lutherans and Presbyterians in the Middle and Southern colonies, and the Friends in Pennsylvania, whatever their denominational differences, was a unit in favor of the utmost simplicity consistent with decency and order; and though there was a difference between Congregational churches like the Old South in Boston and the Friends' meeting-houses in Philadelphia, the difference was far less marked than that existing between the new and old buildings of the Old South society, which the modern tourist may compare at his leisure in the Boston of to-day. Even the Episcopalians shared, or deferred to, the prevailing spirit of the time: they put no cross upon their Christ Church in Cambridge, nearly a hundred and thirty years after the settlement of the place, lest they should offend the tastes of their neighbors. The Methodists, the "Christians," the Swedenborgians, the Unitarians and the Universalists were not yet, and the Moravians were a small and little-understood body in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Nearly all the colonists, of whatever name, brought from Europe a conscientious love of religious simplicity and unpretentiousness: for the most part, the English-speaking settlers were dissenters from the Church which owned all the splendid architectural monuments of the country whence they came; and it was not strange that out of their religious thought grew churches that symbolized the sturdy qualities of a faith which, right or wrong, had to endure exile and poverty and privation—privation not only from social wealth, but from the rich store of ecclesiastical traditions which had accumulated for centuries in cathedral choirs and abbey cloisters.

Therefore, the typical New England meeting-house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may perhaps be taken as the best original example of what America has to show in the way of church-building. To be sure, its cost was modest, its material was perishable wood, its architectural design was often a curious medley of old ideas and new uses, and even its few ornaments were likely to be devoid of the beauty their designers fancied that they possessed. But it was, at any rate, an honest embodiment of a sincere idea—the idea of "freedom to worship God;" and it was adapted to the uses which it was designed to serve. It stood upon a hill, a square box with square windows cut in its sides—grim without and grim within, save as the mellowing seasons toned down its ruder aspects, and green grass and waving boughs framed it as if it were a picture. Within, the high pulpit, surmounted by a sounding-board, towered over the square-backed pews, facing a congregation kept orderly by stern tithing-man and sterner tradition. There was at first neither organ nor stove nor clock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass—viol formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still sat at the end of the pew—a custom which had grown up in the days when they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent forth their milder call. Behind the meeting-houses were the horse-sheds for the use of distant comers—a species of ecclesiastical edifice still adorning the greater number of American country churches, and not likely to disappear for many a year to come.

In the elder day there was no such difference as now between city and country churches, for the limitations of money and material bore upon both more evenly. But with growing wealth and the choice of permanent locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches, boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural tablets and horizontal tombstones were laid into the mortar which has been permitted, in not a few cases, to preserve them for our own eyes.

But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the political events with which they have been associated than by the honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow. Their connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than their relations to the dead. Not because it is Boston's Westminster Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon its front. The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to the common class of brick structures which replaced wooden ones; for, like Solomon's temple, its predecessor had been built of cedar sixty years before. The convenient location of the Old South and the capaciousness of its interior brought to it the colonial meetings which preceded the Revolution, and especially that famous gathering of December 13, 1773, whence marched the disguised patriots to destroy the taxed tea in Boston harbor. The convenient access and spacious audience-room of the old church also led to its occupancy as a riding-school for British cavalry in 1775. Even now, in the quiet days following the recent excitement attending its escape from fire and from sale and demolition, the ancient church still finds occasional use as a place for lectures and public gatherings. Its chequered days within the past decade have at least served to make its appearance and its part in colonial history more familiar to us, and have done something to save other churches from the destruction which might have overtaken them.

As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston, built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785, the first Episcopal church in New England—or rather its remnant—to become the first Unitarian society in America.

In Salem street, Boston, left almost alone at the extreme north end of the city, is Christ Church, built in 1723. Its tower contains the oldest chime of bells in America, and from it, according to some antiquarians, was hung the lantern which on April 18, 1775, announced to the waiting Paul Revere, and through him to the Middlesex patriots in all the surrounding country, that General Gage had despatched eight hundred men to seize and destroy the military stores gathered at Concord by the Massachusetts Committees of Safety and Supplies. Thus opened the Revolutionary war, for the battles at Lexington and Concord took place only the next day.

The white-spired building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets, Boston, known as the Park Street Church, is hardly so old as its extended fame would lead one to suppose, for it dates no farther back than the first quarter of the present century. Its position as the central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as familiar as the "Saybrook Platform." The meeting-house was built at the time when the greater part of the Boston churches were modifying their creeds, and when the Old South itself would have changed its denominational relations but for the vote of a State official, cast to break a tie. Its inelegance and rawness are excused in part by its evident solidity and sincerity of appearance. In its shadow rest Faneuil, Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.

Boston has other churches which, like the Park Street, are neither ancient nor modern, the Hollis Street Church and the First Church in Roxbury being good examples. New England has hardly a better specimen of the old-fashioned meeting-house on a hill than this old weather-beaten wooden First Church in Roxbury, the home of a parish to which John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, once ministered. Another quaint memorial of the old colonial days survives in the current name, "Meeting-house Hill," of a part of the annexed Dorchester district of Boston.

St. Paul's Church, on Boston Common, was the first attempt of the Episcopalians of the city, after the loss of King's Chapel, to build a temple of imposing appearance. Controversies theological and architectural rose with its walls, and young Edward Everett, if report is to be credited, was the author of a tract, still in circulation, in which its design and its principles formed the text for a criticism on the religion to whose furtherance it was devoted. Standing as it does next the United States court-house, the uses of the two buildings seem to have been confused in the builders' minds; for there is something ecclesiastical in the appearance of the hall of justice, which was originally a Masonic temple, and something judicial in the face of the church.

In Cambridge, three miles from Boston, the eighteenth-century Episcopalians not only possessed a church, but also displayed to unwilling eyes a veritable "Bishop's Palace"—the stately house of the Rev. East Apthorp, "missionary to New England" and reputed candidate for the bishopric of that region. Mr. Apthorp was rich and influential, but his social and ecclesiastical lot was not an easy one, and he soon returned to England discouraged, leaving his "palace" to come down to the view of our own eyes, which find in it nothing more dangerous to republican institutions than is to be discovered in a hundred other of the three-story wooden houses which used so to abound in Massachusetts. Christ Church, Cambridge, in which the bishop in posse used to minister, and which stands opposite Harvard College, was designed by the architect of King's Chapel, and has always been praised for a certain shapely beauty of proportion. For the last twenty years it has boasted the only chime of bells in Cambridge, whose quiet shades of a Sunday evening have been sweetly stirred by the music struck from them by the hands of a worthy successor of the mediæval bell-ringers, to whom bells are books, and who can tell the story of every ounce of bell-metal within twenty miles of his tower. It was of this church, with its Unitarian neighbor just across the ancient churchyard where so many old Harvard and colonial worthies sleep, that Holmes wrote:

Like sentinel and nun, they keep
Their vigil on the green:
One seems to guard, and one to weep,
The dead that lie between.

The suburbs of Boston are not poor in churches of the eighteenth, or even of the seventeenth, century. The oldest church in New England—the oldest, indeed, in the Northern States—still standing in Salem, was built in 1634, and its low walls and tiny-paned windows have shaken under the eloquence of Roger Williams. It has not been used for religious purposes since 1672. In Newburyport is one of the American churches, once many but now few, in which George Whitefield preached, and beneath it the great preacher lies buried. A curious little reminder of St. Paul's, London, is found here in the shape of a whispering gallery. Another landmark is the venerable meeting-house of the Unitarian society in Hingham, popularly known as the "Old Ship." Built in 1681, it was a Congregational place of worship for nearly a century and a half. Its sturdiness and rude beauty form a striking illustration of the lasting quality of good, sound wooden beams as material for the sanctuary. Preparations have already been undertaken for celebrating the second centennial of the ancient building. Nearly as old, and still more picturesque with its quaint roof, its venerable hanging chandelier of brass, its sober old reredos and its age-hallowed communion-service, is St. Michael's, Marblehead, built in 1714, where faithful rectors have endeavored to reach six generations of the fishermen and aristocracy of the rocky old port. The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less interest to St. John's, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church, Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop Berkeley used to preach. In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus—the most ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.