I should be an ingrate of a despicable type were I to pass by as matters of no moment, the influences brought to bear upon my life at that date, and through succeeding years, by my association with the several households who made up the family connection in that vicinity. My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Lewis Pierce, owned and occupied the ancient homestead in Dorchester. He was “a character” in his way. Handsome in his youth, he was still a man of imposing presence, especially when, attired in black broadcloth, and clean shaven, he sat on Sunday in the pew owned by the Pierces for eight generations in the old church on “Meeting House Hill.” He did not always approve of the doctrine and politics of the officiating clergyman. He opened his mind to me to this effect one Sunday that summer, as we jogged along in his low-hung phaeton, drawn by a horse as portly and as well-set-up as his master. “The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his. He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.” He leaned forward to flick a fly from the sleek horse with his whip. “I’ve been given to understand that he doesn’t like to see me and some others of the same stripe in church when he preaches for us. I pay no attention to that. If he, or any others of his damnable way of thinking, imagine that I’m to be kept out of the church in which the Pierces owned a pew before this man and his crew were ever thought of, he’ll find himself mistaken. That’s all there is about it!” It was worth seeing, after hearing this, the sturdy old representative of the Puritans, sitting bolt upright in the quaint box-pew where his forbears had worshipped the God of battles over a century before, and keeping what he called his “weather eye” upon the suspected expounder of the gospel of peace. The obnoxious occupant of the ancient and honorable pulpit was, to my notion, an amiable and inoffensive individual. He preached well, and with never an allusion to “higher law.” Yet Uncle Lewis kept watch and ward throughout the service. I could easily believe that he would have arisen to his feet and challenged audibly any approach to the forbidden territory.