I am very frank to say that, as a small boy, the moment of dismission from the church service, after three hours indoors, was a very happy one, and the event usually awaited with pleasure as the crowning circumstance of the function. Truth compels me to state that my facility and celerity in covering the distance along the north side aisle, between the pew door and the vestibule, was something that often amazed my elders. Our pew was third from the front, but I reached the doorway, not wholly out of breath, nor usually mixed up in the crowd. I always did have an admiration for Elijah who could outrun Ahab's chariot and horses. The truth also compels me to add that my idea of happiness, at 12 M., was to join that amazingly large "curbstone committee" of boys and men, often three or four deep, which gathered on the edge of the pavement, among and in front of the "tree boxes"--for Broad Street was lined with trees then--in order to see the thousand or more people come out of the vestibule and down two sets of steps to the pavement. This was the time when, in my eyes, young girls were the prettiest,--even more than they have ever been since, and nearly everything in the world was usually bright and glorious, even though I had many boyish sorrows unknown to the world. I must be self-righteous to confess that often it chanced, that while I had been genuinely "at church" and inside of it, not a few of the "curbstone committee" were young men (with some older ones) who had not been in church at all, but had come to escort the pretty girls home, or to meet their friends; though of course the great majority around the "tree boxes" had been listeners, if not worshippers within. Usually on the large stone platform, between the entrance door and the columns, the pleasant friendly interviews and final handshakes with pastor and parishioners and friends in general, took place.