The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

SUNDAYS OF MY CHILDHOOD.

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The former ran where now is Blackstone street, and crossed
Hanover street in its course, where a drawbridge spanned it.
Mill Pond was a large basin of water where now is Haymarket Square, which, when filled, made the location of the
old station of the Boston & Maine Railroad.
The Sundays of my childhood were not enjoyable days,
they were observed with such unnecessary rigor. All work
was tabooed on that day, even cooking, winter and summer.
The food was cooked the day before. We rose early, and
we children were prepared
for the morning Sundayschool at nine o'clock, The
churches were not sufficiently warmed for the0
winter, and, in many instances, not warmed at all,
and so a foot-stove was AN OLD NEW ENGLAND FOOT-STOVE.
taken by one of us, which the sexton filled with live coals.
We took turns in warming our feet upon it, and then were
half frozen. The Sunday-school ended at half-past ten,
when we adjourned from the vestry to the church. A
sounding-board overhung the pulpit, which was small and
circular and seemingly suspended in the air, for the posts
that upheld it and the narrow, spiral stairway which conducted to it were inclosed by curtains. I thought the
minister, when he passed inside these curtains, rose in the
air, very much as a bird soars from the ground, until he
came to the level where he could be seen by the people.
The minister was Rev. Francis Wayland, afterwards
President of Brown University. He was my first pastor,
and the first I remember. So much was said to me about
the "Meeting-house" being "God's house," and that "God
was always present in his house," that I confounded
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