Bells are sentient things. They are alike full of humour and pathos, of laughter and tears, of mirth and sadness, of gaiety and grief. One may pardon Toby Veck, in Charles Dickens' goblin story, for investing the bells in the church near his station with a strange and solemn character, and peopling the tower with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the bells, of all aspects, shapes, characters, and occupations. "They were so mysterious, often heard and never seen, so high up, so far off, so full of such a deep, strong melody, that he regarded them with a species of awe; and sometimes, when he looked up at the dark, arched windows in the tower, he half expected to be beckoned to by something which was not a bell, and yet was what he had heard so often sounding in the chimes." The bells! The word carries sound and suggestion with it. It fills the air with waves of cadence. "Those Evening Bells" of Thomas Moore's song swing out undying echoes from Ashbourne Church steeple; Alfred Tennyson's bells "ring out the false, ring in the true" across the old year's snow, and his Christmas bells answer each other from hill to hill. There are the tragic bells that Sir Henry Irving hears as the haunted Mathias; "Les Cloches de Corneville" that agitate the morbid mind of the miser Gaspard; and the wild bells that Edgar Allen Poe has set ringing in Runic rhyme. "Bell," says the old German song, "thou soundest merrily when the bridal party to the church doth hie; thou soundest solemnly when, on Sabbath morn, the fields deserted lie; thou soundest merrily at evening, when bed-time draweth nigh; thou soundest mournfully, telling of the bitter parting that hath gone by! Say, how canst thou mourn or rejoice, that art but metal dull? And yet all our sorrowings and all our rejoicings thou art made to express!" In the words of the motto affixed to many old bells, they "rejoice with the joyful, and grieve with the sorrowful"; or, in the original Latin, Gaudemus gaudentibus, Dolemus dolentibus. An old monkish couplet makes the bell thus describe its uses-- Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum: Defuncto ploro, pestum fugo, festa decoro. "I praise the true God, call the people, convene the clergy; I mourn for the dead, drive away pestilence, and grace festivals." Who that possesses--to quote from Cowper--a soul "in sympathy with sweet sounds," can listen unmoved to ----the music of the village bells Falling at intervals upon the ear, In cadence sweet--now dying all away, Now pealing loud again, and louder still, Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on. The same poet makes Alexander Selkirk lament on his solitary isle-- The sound of the church going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Ne'er sigh'd at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.