It is nine o'clock, and the meeting-house bell, with a bold voice of authority, as if it had the sole right to disturb the silence and to speak out, warns the village and the outlying farms that it is the Sabbath, and everybody must prepare to come to meeting; and the little children hear the bell with awe as if it were a living voice, and sacred as a part of the Sabbath, and to be heeded under unknown penalties. Obey thy father and mother; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt go to meeting--seem to them all commandments of the first table. The sound of the bell lingers in their ears and hearts as a Thus saith the Lord. And, lo! at the second bell, the men, who have changed their daily dress and put on their Sabbath clothes, issue from the houses on the village street with their wives and children, and through the street, closely following each other and pounding along in a cloud of dust, comes the long line of wagons from the farms. The sun beats down remorselessly, and the man in heavy woollens, such as he wears in the sleigh in January, sits between two women in their Sabbath garments, the horses trot with a Sabbath jog, and all turn up to the stone platform by the meeting-house, upon which the women alight, and the man drives the horse under the shed, and then chats soberly with the others at the door. But the minister passes in, not clad in gown and bands and cocked hat of the older day, but in plain black clothes. The chatting loiterers follow him in. The bell which has gathered the village into the sacred fold rests from its labors. There is no one in the street. There is no sound. But after a few moments the music of "Old Hundred" pours out of the open doors and windows of the meeting-house, sung by a well-balanced and well-trained choir. It is the opening hymn, and it has a full, vigorous, triumphant sound. Once more Thus saith the Lord. There is another interval of silence, but at a little distance you can hear the voice of reading and prayer. Hark! another hymn. It is "Federal Street," or "Coronation," or "Dundee," but whatever it is, it is a strain from other years, and voices and faces and scenes and days that are no more all blend in the familiar music, and a Sabbath benediction rests upon the listener's soul. A longer silence follows, broken by fragmentary sounds of energetic speech. Is the preacher emphasizing and elucidating the five points? Is he denouncing and alarming that tough regiment in woollen, or winning the wondering and doubting mind? Is his sermon upon an official and perfunctory discourse by which little children are soothed to sleep and in which the elders like unqualified damnation and the hottest fire as a toper likes "power" in his dram? Or is his pure and manly life and conversation his true preaching, and the Sabbath sermon only a statement of the principles of such holy living, and a revival of the colors in the immortal portrait of the holy life of the Gospel?