One of the enterprises on the Barton farm afforded her great joy. The narrow French River ran through her father’s farm. In places it could be crossed by a foot-log, and there were few days when she did not cross and recross it for the sheer joy of finding herself on a trembling log suspended over a deep stream. This river ran the only sawmill in the neighborhood. Here she delighted to ride the carriage which conveyed the logs to the old-fashioned up-and-down saw. The carriage moved very slowly when it was going forward and the saw was eating its laborious way through the log, but it came back with violent rapidity, and the little girl, who remembered nothing but fear of her earliest childhood, was happy when she flaunted her courage in the face of her natural timidity and rode the sawmill carriage as she rode her high-stepping blooded Billy. She went to church every Sunday, and churches in that day had no fires. Her people had been brought up in the orthodox church, but, revolting at the harsh dogmatism of the orthodox theology of that day, they withdrew and became founders of the first Universalist Church in America. The meeting-house at Oxford, built for the Universalist Society, is the oldest building in existence erected for this communion. Hosea Ballou was the first minister--a brave, strong, resolute man. Though the family liberalized their creed, they did not greatly modify the austerity of their Puritan living. They kept the Sabbath about as strictly as they had been accustomed to do before their break with the Puritan church. Once in her childhood Clara broke the Sabbath, and it brought a painful memory: