Curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and the sunlight streamed in with unobstructed and unbroken rays. Heavy shutters for protection were often used, but to close them at time of service would have been to plunge the church into utter darkness. Permission was sometimes given, as in Haverhill, to "sett up a shed outside of the window to keep out the heat of the sun there,"--a very roundabout way to accomplish a very simple end. As years passed on, trees sprang up and grew apace, and too often the churches became overhung and heavily shadowed by dense, sombre spruce, cedar, and fir trees. A New England parson was preaching in a neighboring church which was thus gloomily surrounded. He gave out as his text, "Why do the wicked live?" and as he peered in the dim light at his manuscript, he exclaimed abruptly, "I hope they will live long enough to cut down this great hemlock-tree back of the pulpit window." Another minister, Dr. Storrs, having struggled to read his sermon in an ill-lighted, gloomy church, said he would never speak in that building again while it was so overshadowed with trees. A few years later he was invited to preach to the same congregation; but when he approached the church, and saw the great umbrageous tree still standing, he rode away, and left the people sermonless in their darkness. The chill of these sunless, unheated buildings in winter can well be imagined. Strange and grotesque decorations did the outside of the earliest meeting-houses bear,--grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows and by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped from the severed neck, reddened the logs beneath. The wolf, for his destructiveness, was much more dreaded by the settlers than the bear, which did not so frequently attack the flocks. Bears were plentiful enough. The history of Roxbury states that in 1725, in one week in September, twenty bears were killed within two miles of Boston. This bear story requires unlimited faith in Puritan probity, and confidence in Puritan records to credit it, but believe it, ye who can, as I do! In Salem and in Ipswich, in 1640, any man who brought a living wolf to the meeting-house was paid fifteen shillings by the town; if the wolf were dead, ten shillings. In 1664, if the wolf-killer wished to obtain the reward, he was ordered to bring the wolf's head and "nayle it to the meeting-house and give notis thereof." In Hampton, the inhabitants were ordered to "nayle the same to a little red oake tree at northeast end of the meeting-house." One man in Newbury, in 1665, killed seven wolves, and was paid the reward for so doing. This was a great number, for the wary wolf was not easily destroyed either by musket or wolf-hook. In 1723 wolves were so abundant in Ipswich that parents would not suffer their children to go to and from church and school without the attendance of some grown person. As late as 1746 wolves made sad havoc in Woodbury, Connecticut; and a reward of five