" A full hour's prayer wearied not their patient knees; and the
sermon, with its sixteenthly, finally, and to conclude (before the
_improvement_, itself a modern sermon in length), did not outmeasure the
people's honest sense of their grounds of thankfulness to God.
The landscape appropriate to thanksgiving is not furnished by brick walls
and stone pavements. It is a rural festival. The smoke from scattered
cottages should be slowly curling its way through frosty air. As we look
forth from the low porch of the homestead, the ground lightly covered with
snow, stretches off to a not distant horizon, broken irregularly with
hills, clothed in spots with evergreens, but oftener with bare woods. The
distant and infrequent sleigh-bells, with the smart crack of the rifle
from the shooting match in the hollow, strike percussively upon the ear.
Vast piles of fuel, part neatly corded, part lying in huge logs, with
heaps of brush, barricade the brown, paintless farmhouses. Swine, hanging
by the ham-strings in the neighboring shed; the barn-yard speckled with
the ruffled poultry, some sedate with recent bereavement, others cackling
with a dim sense of temporary reprieve; the rough-coated steer butting in
the fold, where the timid sheep huddle together in the corner; little boys
on a single skate improving the newly frozen horse-pond--these furnish the
foreground of the picture during the earlier hours of the morning.
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