"My grandfather," said he, "went to church the Sunday after the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, and when the clergyman read the prayers for the royal family he stood up in his pew and cried out that no such prayers must be read in Belfield--that George III.'s name was no longer the name of our friend, but of our worst enemy. The minister rose and shut up his prayer-book forthwith, raised his hand and pronounced the benediction, and the church was closed until the end of the war. We were good Federalists, we were," continued Mr. Lenox, "but we had one staunch Tory and Churchman in our family. After the church was closed my grandfather's family used to attend Presbyterian meeting on the hill, close by where your schoolhouse now stands; but their old dog, Duke, would never go past the church when he followed his master out on Sunday mornings: he would not go to Presbyterian meeting--not he: he stretched himself on the great millstone before the closed church-door."
When Jack, Harry and I sat together on the high "back seat" at school we had a good view down the hill at the weather-stained old church, with its imperishable gilt vane on top of the tall spire. Often enough our vagrant eyes wandered that way, but not that we cared for green slopes or colonial church or venerable weathercock. The truth of the matter was, that we oftentimes saw Georgy Lenox walking along the quiet street under the elms. To tell of our early life in Belfield, and say nothing of the influence which was already moulding the lives of at least two of us, would be to give an incomplete and partial picture. I was an imaginative boy, and Jack was the reverse, yet we were both desperately in love with the same girl. As for Harry, nobody ever decided what he felt toward her. They continually quarrelled when they were together, and Harry sometimes took pains to abuse her in her absence: he never read of an unworthy trait in a woman but he at once pointed its meaning at her. He called us "spoons," etc. for caring about her, yet, all the same, she must have been invested with an endless store of associations in his mind, for his portfolio was full of sketches of her; which seemed to furnish his ideals of feminine beauty. She was not only Rowena, but Rebecca as well (with only a change of complexion), Helen of Troy and Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and the Madonna, Marie Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor. Still, Jack and I each felt that he was not one with us in his devotion to her, and we made no confidences to him respecting her. For Jack and I talked about her incessantly when we were together: when we saw her in the street below us we nudged each other, and together felt the thrill, the inextinguishable rapture, of beholding the sunny gleam of her golden hair and her quick, graceful gait.