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It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery running round three sides of the building. On the fourth side the pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it.
The sounding-board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved. Little wonder it is the musical monarch.
There was a church, which we had been told was the oldest in the region. Through the windows we saw the high pulpit and sounding-board, and finally found the keys at a house near by; so we went in and looked around at our leisure.
A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from Mr. Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from distant corners of the parish perhaps from Dissenting chapels. You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of Shepperton.
Thus, although vocal tone originates within the larynx, it sets the resonance-cavities into sympathetic vibration, and these produce the harmonics that give the fundamental tone its timbre; the resonance-cavities being to the vocal cords or lips what the body or resonance-box of the violin and the sounding-board of the pianoforte are to their strings, the tube of a cornet or horn to the lips, the body of the clarinet to its reed the resonating factor which determines the overtones and through these the timbre.
After waiting for a reasonable time, until all who were expected to attend were supposed to be in the house, the minister rose from his seat, in the high, wine-glass shaped pulpit, over which hung, like the sword of Damocles, by a cord, an immense sounding-board, considered indispensable, duly to scatter round that each might have his appropriate portion, the crumbs of salvation he dispensed, and "gave out" an appropriate hymn, in which the Supreme Being was acknowledged as the Ruler of the Seasons.
The human voice, on the other hand, is much less limited in its powers of tonal and emotional coloring. It is not dependent for its resonance on a rigid tube, like the flute, or an unchangeable sounding-board, like the violin or the piano, but on the cavity of the mouth, which can be enlarged and altered at will by the movements of the lower jaw, and the soft parts the tongue and the glottis.
The immediate, contemporary act or predicament loses more than half its meaning and impressiveness if it be re-echoed from no sounding-board in the past its notes, however sweetly and truly touched, fall flatly on the ear.
Somebody laughed and fled " "Oh, I know, Knox. I heard that damnable laughter, too." "My God," I whispered, "who was it? What was it? Where did it come from?" "As well ask where the shot came from, Knox. Out amongst all those trees, with a house that might have been built for a sounding-board, who could presume to say where either came from? One thing we know, that the shot came from the south."
Presently she said, "Here is a very curious anecdote, which I will read you; but first I must explain to you what a sounding-board is. "In old fashioned churches, there used to hang, directly over the pulpit, a large, round board, like the top of a table, which, it was thought, assisted the minister's voice to be heard by all the congregation.
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