“The services Deacon Enos offered to his God were all given with the exactness of an ancient Israelite. No words could have persuaded him of the propriety of meditating while the choir were singing, or of sitting down, even through infirmity, before the close of the longest prayer that ever was offered. A mighty contrast was he to his fellow-officer, Deacon Abrams, a tight, little, tripping, well-to-do man, who used to sit beside him with his hair brushed straight up like a little blaze, his coat buttoned up trig and close, his psalm-book in hand, and his quick, gray eyes turned first on one side of the broad aisle, and then on the other, and then up into the gallery like a man who came to church on business and felt responsible for everything that was going on in the house.” The observant child Harriet, sitting on the bench in the children’s row from Sabbath to Sabbath in the Litchfield church, must have watched these grave deacons that seem so much like story-book people as she gives her accurate memories of them. “At this instant Deacon Enos Dudley’s mild and venerable form arose before me, as erst it used to rise from the deacon’s seat, a straight close slip just below the pulpit. I recollect his quiet and lowly coming into meeting, precisely ten minutes before the time, every Sunday, his tall form a little stooping, his best suit of butternut-colored Sunday clothes, with long flaps and wide cuffs, on one of which two pins were always to be seen stuck in with the most reverent precision. When seated, the top of the pew came just to his chin, so that his silvery placid head rose above it like the moon above the horizon. His head was one that might have been sketched for a St. John--bald at the top, and around the temples adorned with a soft flow of bright, fine hair.... He was then of great age, and every line of his patient face seemed to say, ‘And now, Lord, what wait I for?’ Yet still, year after year, he was to be seen in the same place with the same dutiful regularity.” Those two pins set precisely upon the deacon’s cuff ought to be immortalized along with the two-pronged stick in Defoe’s famous “Journal.” In either case it was not in the least necessary to mention the slight circumstance; yet by the very casualness of the reference is given the precious air of verisimilitude that the artist most desires.