“You jest wait. There’s a great to-do now about a woman’s gittin’ up to speak in a revival-meetin’. Wal, in my father’s day, there was a great to-do about their not wearin’ their veils into the meetin’-house. Ministers took sides, and arter a while it got into the Boston newspapers. The greatest ministers in the State preached for and agin it. There was a famous minister came to our town. I’ve heard my father tell the story many a time. Father said he was among the last of his teens then, and said he used to sit in a square pew in the gallery, back to the pulpit; and the girl he wanted to go with sat down below, jest far enough off, and not too near, for him to keep lookin’ at her, and she at him, now and then; and that kind o’ took up his mind in sermon-time. He had never durst to try to be her beau in earnest. He’d walked alongside once or twice, but never’d had the face to offer his arm; and he’d made dependence on his Sundays, and been steady to meetin’ for reasons aforesaid. Wal, when the veil question begun to make a stir, all the girls, and she among ’em, became persuaded in their minds they ought to wear their veils into the meetin’-house, and keep ’em down; and this caused a dreadful _de_privation to him, and to others likewise. “And, arter things had gone on so a spell, there came a famous preacher to town, one of the uncommon rare ones; and he preached a sermon with thirteen heads, all goin’ to show that women could keep their veils down, or not keep ’em down, jest as they pleased. That was in the forenoon. Father said, that, in the arternoon, every single girl in that meetin’-house sat all meetin’-time with her veil up. He said ’twas jest like light breakin’ in arter a cloudy shadow.” “And what about the girl?” asked Martha Fennel. “Did he have the girl?” “No. The girl had a young man that she didn’t look at, that sat over across in the other gallery.” “But it can’t be true,” remarked Adeline Payne, “that ministers really did pretend to dictate whether women should wear veils, or not?” “Jest what Mr. Picket’s wife said, over at Elm Bridge, when I told them this same story. I said ’twas actooally true. And Mr. Picket, said he, ‘I tell you how we’ll prove it. You said ’twas in the old Boston newspapers. My cousin goes representative to General Court. They keep files of the old Boston papers in the Boston Library,’ says he; ‘and I’ll write my cousin word to look ’em over.’ We reckoned back, and found father must have been among the last of his teens about the year 1800. So Mr. Picket wrote word to his cousin; and his cousin looked the files over, and found a paper that had a piece in it on this very subject; and the name of the paper, if I don’t mistake my memory, was ‘The Columbia Sentinel.’”