to
the modern church bell. To any one who has resided in a Catholic
country, where the ringing of bells, from matins to vespers, is
incessant, to one with recent memories of college days, of being rung
up in the morning before having his sleep out, rung to prayers before
he had finished his breakfast, rung to recitation before he had
mastered his lesson, and rung to bed before reaching the "Yours
_truly_" of his love letter, the Sabbath bell is not likely to suggest
ideas of a devotional character. After all, is it not essentially a
relic of barbarism, a pagan institution like the beating of gongs in
the Chinese ceremony of chinchinning the moon? The blowing of the conch
shell is not open to the objection of degrading association; it must
have called to mind the trumpets and rams' horns in the awe-inspiring
Hebrew ceremonial. Fancy instead of the ding-dong of sounding brass in
most village churches, that can sometimes hardly be distinguished from
the locomotive bell, the clear liquid notes of a silver bugle, similar
in character to one of the musical infantry calls, flung by the echoes
from hill to hill, and dying faintly away over the meadows and along
the river. Even the custom of firing a cannon, one great noise, heard
at the furthest boundaries of the parish, and then done with, would be
better than the continual repetition of the strokes of a bell, now
violent and quick, as though calling out all the hose and hook and
ladder companies of the fire department, now slowly dying away,
tantalizing the listener with the expectation that now at last they are
really going to cease, only to bitterly disappoint him by breaking out
again with renewed clamor. Most beautiful of all must have been the
silent lifting of the flag, a symbol which evangelist Bliss has taken
from the signal service in "Hold the Fort":

Wave the answer back to heaven,
By Thy grace we will.

And how popular such a summons would be with the ungodly--leaving them
in peace to enjoy their Sunday morning nap!

But we are wandering from our subject. Suffice it to say that the object
of sounding brass into which Sergeant Wright was looking was not a bell.
Neither was it a cannon, for a howitzer of that calibre, or a few
smaller pieces of sounding brass, would have prevented the sad tragedy
of the Indian captivity, and in that case the events herein chronicled
would never have transpired. Sergeant Judah Wright was looking at Mr.
Hoyt's brass kettle