Arrived at the log meeting-house, they hitched their horses to swinging limbs, where the animals could fight flies without breaking the bridle-reins. Nancy went inside immediately and took her seat on the left side of the room; Thomas remained outside gossiping with his neighbors concerning "craps" and politics, and maybe swapping a horse before the service had gotten fairly under way. After a while he heard the preacher in stentorian tones lining and singing the opening hymn, the thin, high voices of the women joining him feebly at first but growing a little more confident as the hymn proceeded. Then Thomas and his neighbors straggled in and sat on the right side of the house. The floor was puncheon and so were the seats; they were rudely split slabs, roughly hewn, and the second sitting from either end had an added element of discomfort in the projection of the two legs that had been driven in from the under side and were not sawed off flush with the surface of the slab. There were no glass windows. On either side of the house one section of a log may have been sawed out about four feet from the floor; but most of the light of the interior came in through the open door in mild weather, or was afforded by the fireplace in cold weather. On the rude pulpit lay the preacher's Bible and hymn book, if he had a hymn book--no one else had one; and beside these were a bucket of water and a gourd. There was no time in the service when Thomas Lincoln did not feel free to walk up to the pulpit and drink a gourd of water, and the same was true of every other member of the congregation, the preacher included. As for Nancy, she spread her riding-skirt on the seat under her and when her baby grew hungry she nursed him just as the other women nursed their babies. To such congregations the author of this present book preached hundreds of times in the woods of Kentucky; and there is no essential feature of the church services which he does not know. In the autumn, just before fodder-pulling time, there was an occasional camp-meeting or big revival, followed by a baptizing, which brought multitudes of people from long distances. They brought their provisions, or they stayed with friends, one cabin proving elastic enough to accommodate two or three households. Under these conditions the author of this book has slept many nights in houses of one room, with as many beds as the room could well contain, inhabited not only by the family but by visitors of both sexes; and in all that experience he is unable to recall any incident that was immodest. When the converts of the camp-meeting or revival were baptized, they were led into the water with due solemnity; but as each one came to the surface he or she was likely to break forth into shouting, a proceeding which, as the author can testify, was sometimes embarrassing, if not indeed perilous,[4] to the officiating clergyman.