ORANGE CONG. CHURCH 57 The structures I have described were the meeting-houses of Connecticut in 1835, when Barber's book was compiled, and for fifty years before that. They belong to the period that began with the close of the Revolutionary war and extended through the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century. There are a few still standing, mostly on the hill-tops of country parishes. But the first New England meeting-houses were built a hundred and fifty years earlier than this, and this long period developed some slight differences of style. There was of course growth in those ancient communities, which showed itself in the house of worship ; but such was the permanency of old customs and old fashions, such the stability of New England society and such its hatred of change, that we may select our sample meeting-house anywhere in the eighteenth century, and feel sure that it will fairly represent the whole. And if this is true of the meeting-house, it is true also of the churchly customs and fashions connected with it. Many of them remained unchanged for nearly two hundred years. When the settlements were young and weak, the meeting-houses were necessarily small and rude. The earliest of which we have record-say as early as 1632-consisted of a single room, perhaps twenty by thirty-six feet in size, and twelve feet high "in the stud." The roof, if not shingled, was thatched with long grass. The light came straggling in, through little diamond-shaped panes, and sometimes glass was so scarce that oiled paper was used in its stead. In Waterbury, for example, the first meeting-house was built in 1694, but its windows were destitute of glass for at least twenty years. A greater deprivation than this was the absence of fires. The winters of two hundred years ago were as frigid, I suppose, as those of to-day, yet there were no fires in New England meeting-houses, except those which smouldered in foot-stoves. These buildings have been truthfully described as "cold, desolate places," and they were sometimes disagreeably and painfully cold. "So cold,"