These early churches were unheated, and it is told that the half-frozen domines preached with heavy knit or fur caps pulled over their ears, and wearing mittens, or _wollen handt-schoenen_; and that _myn heer_ as well as _myn vrouw_ carried muffs. It is easy to fancy some men carrying muffs,--some love-locked Cavalier or mincing Horace Walpole; but such feminine gear seems to consort ill with an Albany Dutchman. That he should light his long pipe in meeting was natural enough,--to keep warm; though folk do say that he smoked in meeting in summer too,--to keep cool. By the middle of the eighteenth century the Albany and Schenectady churches had stoves perched up on pillars on a level with the gallery,--in high disregard or ignorance of the laws of calorics; hence, of course, the galleries, in which sat the men, were fairly heated, while the ground floor and the _vrouws_ remained below in icy frigidity. It is told of more than one old-time sexton, that he loudly asserted his office and his importance by noisy rattling-down and replenishing of the gallery stoves and slamming of the iron doors at the most critical point in the domine’s sermon. Cornelius Van Schaick, the Albany sexton, made his triumphant way to the stoves, slashing with his switch (perhaps his dog-whip) all the boys who chanced to be in his way. The women of the congregation carried foot-stoves of perforated metal or wood, which were filled with a box of living coals, to afford a little warmth to the feet. Many now living remember the scratching sound of these stoves on the boards or the sanded floor as they were passed from warm feet to cold feet near at hand. _Kerck-stooven_ appear on the earliest inventories, were used in America until our own day, and still are used in the churches in Holland. In an anteroom in a Leyden church may be seen several hundred _stooven_ for use in the winter. It is stated of the churches in New York City that until 1802 services were held, even in the winter-time, with wide-open doors, and that often the snow lay in little drifts up the aisles,--which may have been one reason why young folk flocked to Trinity Church.