This was all that art had done to accommodate nature to the purposes of man.
In the body of the wood immediately adjacent, fastened to the overhanging branches, were the goodly steeds of the company; forming, in themselves, to the unaccustomed and inexperienced eye, a grouping the most curious.

Some, more docile than the rest; were permitted to rove at large, cropping the young herbage and tender grass; occasionally, it is true, during the service, overleaping their limits in a literal sense; neighing, whinnying and kicking up their heels to the manifest confusion of the pious and the discomfiture of the preacher.
The hour at length arrived.

The audience was numerous if not select.

All persuasions--for even in that remote region sectarianism had done much toward banishing religion--assembled promiscuously together and without show of discord, excepting that here and there a high stickler for church aristocracy, in a better coat than his neighbor, thrust him aside; or, in another and not less offensive form of pride, in the externals of humility and rotten with innate malignity, groaned audibly through his clenched teeth; and with shut eyes and crossed hands, as in prayer, sought to pass a practical rebuke upon the less devout exhibitions of those around him.

The cant and the clatter, as it prevails in the crowded mart, were here in miniature; and Charity would have needed something more than a Kamschatka covering to have shut out from her eyes the enormous hypocrisy of many among the clamorous professors of that faith of which they felt little and knew less.