Before we can answer there is a burst of music, then two strokes of the bell to announce that "meeting is out;" then an issue of the congregation, a procession homeward, a driving away of wagons, and soon once more the solitary street. In the afternoon there is the Sabbath-school, and the good pastor preaches at one of the school-houses in a farther part of the town. But it is always the Sabbath, in every sight and sound until the sun has set, and then from the neighboring house upon the hill above the village street comes a clear, resonant soprano voice singing hymns and prolonging the solemn spell of the holy day. The tithing-men are gone, and the deacons do not sit severe and conspicuous in the meeting-house, and the minister has not the air of a lord spiritual of the village; and the genius of modern times and the spirit of the age are entertained with full consciousness of what they are. But it is still the sober and constrained and decorous New England Sabbath which recurs every seventh day; and the honest, industrious, intelligent, self-respecting, plain-living village recalls remotely the day of the severer dispensation, and illustrates the noble manhood that the severe dispensation fostered. THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS. 1884 On a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public attention. Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city, and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars. The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials, which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.