Cambridge sketches
Estelle M. H. Merrill, Ed.

As a specimen of this man's zeal, it is related that taking advantage one Sunday of the absence of his minister, Dr. Stearns, who afterwards went to Amherst College as president, he attempted to introduce the abhorred doctrine into the pulpit.

Now it was in those times the custom for the members of the congregation who were afflicted in mind, body or estate, to send written requests to the minister officiating, that prayer might be offered on their behalf. The phraseology might be “Mr. Bimelech Stone desires the prayers of the church, the same being very weak and low” ; or “Mrs. Tremor desires prayers for the sudden death of her husband, that it may be sanctified to her everlasting good.” On the way home, it would not be remarked by one hearer to another, that Mr. Stone was very ill, or Mrs. Tremor bereaved, but that they “had a note up.”

Sometimes the paper contained a suggestion to be acted upon without being read aloud. The note Dr. C. sent was meant to be of this kind. These were the words: “There is a slaveholder in my pew; please to cut him up in the last prayer.”

But to turn from this digression to the public school which, to use Mrs. Burnett's phrase, is “the one I knew the best of all,” viz., that founded in ZZZ809,. of which I became a member somewhere in the twenties. Though the schoolhouse was a building of two stories, only the lower one was occupied by the school. The outer door opened into a little vestibule where were nails for hanging coats and hats; here too was another door to a stairway with which we had nothing to do. The schoolroom itself — there was but one (a fine contrast