"The Squire hasn't finished the plans for the inside of the meeting-house yet?"
"No—no—no," returned Richard, speaking quickly, but making a significant pause between each negative—"it requires reflection. There is a great deal of room to fill up, and I am afraid we shall not know how to dispose of it to advantage. There will be a large vacant spot around the pulpit, which I do not mean to place against the wall, like a sentry-box stuck up on the side of a fort."
"It is ruleable to put the deacons' box under the pulpit," said Hiram; and then, as if he had ventured too much, he added, "but there's different fashions in different countries."
"That there is," cried Benjamin; "now, in running down the coast of Spain and Portingall, you may see a nunnery stuck out on every head-land, with more steeples and outriggers, such as dog-vanes and weather-cocks, than you'll find aboard of a three-masted schooner. If-so-be that a well-built church is wanting, Old England, after all, is the country to go to, after your models and fashion-pieces. As to Paul's, thof I've never seen it, being that it's a long way up town from Radcliffe-highway and the docks, yet every body knows that it's the grandest place in the world. Now, I've no opinion but this here church over there, is as like one end of it, as a grampus is to a whale; and that's only a small difference in bulk. Mounsheer Ler Quaw here, has been in foreign parts, and thof that is not the same as having been at home, yet he must have seen churches in France too, and can form a small idee of what a church should be: now, I ask the Mounsheer to his face, if it is not a clever little thing, taking it by and large?"
"It ees ver apropos to saircumstonce,"' said
