Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the ElephantHolt, Mathew Joseph
History
Voices; Birth-Marks; The Man and the Elephant
Holt, Mathew Joseph
Kentucky -- Fiction; Kentucky -- History
On Sunday morning the church doors were opened regularly at nine
o’clock, though service did not begin until ten. From sunrise a person
might stand in the church yard and looking out over the Valley see the
worshippers leaving their distant homes and in convergent and
ever-increasing numbers approach the church from every direction. They
came in family groups or singly; on foot and on horseback; a few in
carriages and farm wagons; sometimes a family on a single horse; the
wife riding behind her husband, with a baby in her lap and a child of
tender years clinging on behind her.
At nine-thirty, the sweet voiced bell was first tolled; most of the
congregation had already gathered in neighborly little groups under the
trees. The women on their side of the yard discussed family news and
local gossip; while the men on their side talked of crops and sports,
hinted at horse trades to be consummated on the morrow and argued over
politics, taxation and religion.
There was a distinct group of several families from far away Greenaway
Court; in the main conformists who at the time having no church of their
own to attend, came to Jackson River. They were kindly received in the
settlement and welcomed by the congregation. They remained to themselves
until the last church bell rang, when they, too, separated; the men
going in the door to the right and the women to the left, as was the
custom of the Valley congregations. Each mother with her girls about
her, walked down the aisle and shooed them into a pew; while beyond the
partition, over which the top of a tall man’s head might be glimpsed,
the fathers found seats for themselves with their boys.
The schoolmaster announced and read the hymn, which was considered
necessary, as books were few; then whanging his tuning fork until the
key suited his trained ear, led in singing the hymn—Reconsecration—by
Rev. Samuel Davies.
Here at that cross where flows the blood
That bought my guilty soul for God;
Thee, my new Master, now I call,
And consecrate to Thee my all.
As he was in the midst of his first long prayer; the one in which it was
the custom to pray by name for the sick, afflicted and dissolute; and
for the heads and representatives of government from the King to the
county magistrate; he was interrupted by the piping voice of
four-year-old Dorothy Fairfax, of Greenaway Court, who sitting near the
partition and peeping through a gimlet hole made by some bad boy, saw
little John Calvin Campbell, of her own age, not more than a foot away.
In the unsubdued voice of infant innocence, she piped out: “’ittle boy,
peep through the ’ole.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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