Noon-houses were much more frequent in Connecticut than in Massachusetts, and in several small towns in the former State they were used weekly between Sunday services until within the memory of persons now living; and some of the buildings still exist, though changed into granaries or stables. There was one also in use for many years and until recent years in Topsfield, in Massachusetts. We chanced upon one still standing on a lonely Narragansett road. A little enclosed burial-place, with moss-grown and weather-smoothed head-stones and neglected graves, was by the side of a filled-in cellar, upon which a church evidently had once stood. At a short distance from the church-site was a long, low, gray, weather-beaten wooden building, with a coarse stone-and-mortar chimney at one end, and a great door at the other. Two small windows, destitute of glass, permitted us to peer into the interior of this dilapidated old structure, and we saw within, a floor of beaten earth, a rough stone fireplace, and a few rude horse-stalls. We felt sure that this tumble-down building had been neither a dwelling-house nor a stable, but a noon-house; and the occupants of a neighboring farm-house confirmed our decision. Too worthless to destroy, too out of the way to be of any use to any person, that old noon-house, through neglect and isolation, has remained standing until to-day. It was not until the use of chaises and wagons became universal, and the new means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion, and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect, of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church had "liberty to erect a Horse House in the Meeting House Lane." This horse house was a horse-shed. The "wretched boys" were not permitted even in these noon-houses to talk, much less to "sporte and playe." In some parishes it was ordered by the minister and the deacons that the Bible should be read and expounded to them, or a sermon be read to keep them quiet during the nooning. Occasionally some old patriarch would explain to them the notes that he had taken during the morning sermon. More unbearable still, the boys were sometimes ordered to explain the notes which they had taken themselves. I would I had heard some of those explanations! Thus they literally, as was written in 1774, throve on the "Good Fare of Brown Bread and the Gospell."