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As we came up we heard a bell, and soon were aware of a brown mob running, with somewhat mysterious in the midst. Was it the Host? or a funeral? or a fight? Soon the mob came up with profound salutations, and smiles of self- satisfaction, evidently thinking that they had done a fine thing; and disclosed, hanging on a long bamboo, their one church-bell.
A wild stormy wind swayed the branches of the apple-trees, surging and roaring as it rushed over the downs; the candles flickered and burned low, and from them dropped those strange waxen off-shoots that old women call winding-sheets. At last the church-bell struck twelve, slowly, awfully. Betty was listening still, her head raised, her finger on her lip. "Hush!" she said, with a strange smile.
He began to feel frightened. "Hang it all!" he thought. "Here I am afraid in the dark like a child! Idiotic!" Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . he heard the clock in the next room. The church-bell chimed the hour in the churchyard close by. The bell tolled slowly, depressingly, mournfully. . . . A cold chill ran down Vaxin's neck and spine.
Carter to waken those gentlemen, Frank bethought himself of the church-bell, which hung from a rude frame outside the building, and hurrying to it, seized the rope and began to pull it violently. The effect of the loud clanging of the bell was almost instantaneous, and the colored people began pouring from their tumble-down old houses, and hurrying towards the church to see what was the matter.
And then there wuz the first cannon ever brought to America, and the first church-bell ever rung in America, and picters of every place that Columbus ever had anything to do with, and a hull set of photographs of hisen. Good creeter! it is a shame and a disgrace that there is so many on 'em, and all lookin' so different as different as Josiah and Queen Elizabeth.
I loitered about the garden, listening to the distant church-bell ringing for the afternoon service. Without any cause that I knew of to account for it, I was so restless that nothing I could do attracted me or quieted me. Returning to the house, I tried to occupy myself with my collection of insects, sadly neglected of late. Useless! My own moths failed to interest me. I went back to the garden.
A strange quiet was upon the lead; it needed only the chastened clanging of a church-bell to complete the suggestion of an English Sabbath. Jim was sitting on the foot of his bunk reading. Mike had gone up the creek on a prospecting expedition. Presently a magpie in a dead tree at a little distance burst into full-throated melody. Done dropped his book to listen.
Nature never vouchsafed to wearied man a lovelier day of rest than the still Sunday on which Frank Armitage rode slowly back from the station. The soft, mellow tone of the church-bell, tolling the summons for morning service, floated out from the brown tower, and was echoed back from the rocky cliff glistening in the August sunshine on the northern bluff.
His nap had probably lasted a good while, when the cup chanced to graze against a rock, and, in consequence, immediately resounded and reverberated through its golden or brazen substance, a hundred times as loudly as ever you heard a church-bell. The noise awoke Hercules, who instantly started up and gazed around him, wondering whereabouts he was.
I should say myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound that memorises it.
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