a tea-kettle, which if you shut the nozzle tight, may
either throw off the lid with great force, or the kettle itself bursts
with the strain upon it. So the steam, under the earth, heated by central
fires, and gaining immense volume and power, seeks the hollows in its
neighborhood, and rushes into them with a force which produces the
concussion and the rumbling sound; and the shaking of the surface which
we perceive is really like the commotion in the tea-kettle and the
trembling of the vessel when the steam has no vent. It is an awful
thought that we thus live over the action of these subterranean fires;
but they are in the control of the Almighty, and all we have to do is to
submit to God's will and merciful providence."

St. Paul's Church, of which Uncle Richard was a vestryman, owed its
origin to the separation of certain persons from the Congregational mode
of worship, and the formation of a society for the resumption of the
Protestant Episcopal pattern, as long ago as the year 1712. Their place
of worship they named Queen Anne's Chapel,[9] in honor of the
sovereign "at home," the last of the direct Stuart line, whose royal
person, it is said, having grown too unwieldy to permit horseback
exercise, she was in the habit of following the hunt, of which she was
passionately fond, driving herself, helter-skelter, in a one-horse
chaise. She has the credit of having bestowed some endowment upon the
Chapel, and the Bishop of London presented it with a bell; which, if all
accounts be true, still hangs in the steeple of a congregational
meeting-house within the precinct of the "Plains," where the Chapel once
stood. For that edifice, probably not having been very substantially
built, and being situated on a barren tract of land, afterwards known as
"Grasshopper Plains," and, for the convenience of the scattered
parishioners, placed at a distance from every one of them, and hence
subject to various causes of dilapidation, especially when St. Paul's,
within the town, was in process of construction, at length fell to ruin;
and the bell was carried privately away--so runs the tale--and was long
buried in the ground, but has now for many years summoned the people to a
style of worship which would have appealed in vain to the good Bishop of
London for any such donation. It may be supposed that it could not be
identified, after its interment, and perhaps the obliteration, naturally
or otherwise, of its peculiar marks; or the succes