The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back
to, is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit
early in the forenoon. We found it where we left it the night
before, lifting its tower from the brink of the Witham, and
looking far out over the flat land to a sea no flatter. The land
seems indeed, like so much English coast, merely the sea come
ashore, and turned into fens for the greater convenience of the
fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we saw about the
town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging bare-
armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church
had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under
their flat gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its
mellow-throated bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been
hustling for liberty, and money, and culture, and all the good
things of this world, and getting them in a measure that would
astonish their namesakes. Within the church we saw again the
beautiful tombs of the night before, and others like them, and
again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we could make out a
little better than at first, because its garlands were a little
more withered and shrunken away.
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