up a hundred thousand masts, peaks, and towers; or wrapped round with
thunder-cloud canopies, before, which the white gables shine whiter;
day and night the kind little carillon plays its fantastic melodies
overhead. The bells go on ringing. Quot vivos vocant, mortuos plangunt,
fulgara frangunt; so on to the past and future tenses, and for how many
nights, days, and years! Whilst the French were pitching their fulgara
into Chasse's citadel, the bells went on ringing quite cheerfully.
Whilst the scaffolds were up and guarded by Alva's soldiery, and
regiments of penitents, blue, black, and gray, poured out of churches
and convents, droning their dirges, and marching to the place of the
Hotel de Ville, where heretics and rebels were to meet their doom,
the bells up yonder were chanting at their appointed half-hours and
quarters, and rang the mauvais quart d'heure for many a poor soul. This
bell can see as far away as the towers and dykes of Rotterdam. That one
can call a greeting to St. Ursula's at Brussels, and toss a recognition
to that one at the town-hall of Oudenarde, and remember how after a
great struggle there a hundred and fifty years ago the whole plain was
covered with the flying French cavalry--Burgundy, and Bern, and the
Chevalier of St. George flying like the rest. "What is your clamor about
Oudenarde?" says another bell (Bob Major THIS one must be). "Be still,
thou querulous old clapper! I can see over to Hougoumont and St. John.
And about forty-five years since, I rang all through one Sunday in June,
when there was such a battle going on in the corn-fields there, as none
of you others ever heard tolled of. Yes, from morning service until
after vespers, the French and English were all at it, ding-dong." And
then calls of business intervening, the bells have to give up their
private jangle, resume their professional duty, and sing their hourly
chorus out of Dinorah.

What a prodigious distance those bells can be heard! I was awakened this
morning to their tune, I say. I have been hearing it constantly ever
since. And this house whence I write, Murray says, is two hundred and
ten miles from Antwerp. And it is a week off; and there is the bell
still jangling its shadow dance out of Dinorah. An audible shadow you
understand, and an invisible sound, but quite distinct; and a plague
take the tune!

UNDER THE BELLS.--Who has not seen the church under the bells? Those
lofty aisles, those twilight chapels, that c