CENTENNIAL HISTORY wrote Judge Sewall in his Diary, on the 24th of January, 1636, "that the sacramental bread is frozen pretty hard, and rattles sadly in the plates." It seems to us strange that such a condition of things was tolerated, but down to a recent date it seems to have been considered a questionable matter whether the heating of a meeting-house was not too great a concession to the carnal man. Dr. Bushnell, in his discourse on the "Age of Homespun," picturing the house of God as he remembered it, said, "There is no furnace or stove, save the foot-stoves that are filled from the fires of the neighboring houses, and brought in partly as a rather formal compliment to the delicacy of the tender sex, and sometimes because they are really wanted." This was the universal custom as late as the early part of the nineteenth century. When stoves were first introduced, which was in 1817, they were looked upon as an innovation to be stoutly resisted. The interior arrangement of a meeting-house was very different from that of a modern church edifice. At first it was seated with rude benches made of slabs, the flat side up, but these, as soon as possible, were superseded by pews. In Waterbury, for instance, those who were "seated in the seats" had permission given them in 1769 "to turn them into pews," provided they did so "at their own expense." In Plymouth, Conn., during the building of their first edifice, in 1749, "a vote was passed to have a pew on each side of the pulpit, and one each side of the front door, in all four in number, and the rest fitted up with seats. " The old-fashioned pews, which were once looked upon as so much more desirable than benches, might almost be described as large boxes without lids. Sometimes the top of the wooden wall was made of banister work, or a row of turned spindles surmounted by a rail. A recent writer, dealing in reminiscences of his own childhood, speaks of the music these spindles used to make, when the little folk, standing on the seats, worked them loose and turned them until they creaked. The seats in the pews--this same writer tells us--"used to be hung with hinges, so that the people, standing during prayers,