The landlady, indeed, had already given them a hint that she and the family wanted to go to church, and to shut up the house in their absence. Kenelm drew out his purse, but Tom did the same with a return of cloud on his brow, and Kenelm saw that he would be mortally offended if suffered to be treated as an inferior; so each paid his due share, and the two men resumed their wandering. This time it was along a by-path amid fields, which was a shorter cut than the lane they had previously followed, to the main road to Luscombe. They walked slowly till they came to a rustic foot-bridge which spanned a gloomy trout-stream, not noisy, but with a low, sweet murmur, doubtless the same stream beside which, many miles away, Kenelm had conversed with the minstrel. Just as they came to this bridge there floated to their ears the distant sound of the hamlet church-bell. “Now let us sit here a while and listen,” said Kenelm, seating himself on the baluster of the bridge. “I see that you brought away your pipe from the inn, and provided yourself with tobacco: refill the pipe and listen.” Tom half smiled and obeyed. “O friend,” said Kenelm, earnestly, and after a long pause of thought, “do you not feel what a blessed thing it is in this mortal life to be ever and anon reminded that you have a soul?” Tom, startled, withdrew the pipe from his lips, and muttered,-- “Eh!” Kenelm continued,-- “You and I, Tom, are not so good as we ought to be: of that there is no doubt; and good people would say justly that we should now be within yon church itself rather than listening to its bell. Granted, my friend, granted; but still it is something to hear that bell, and to feel by the train of thought which began in our innocent childhood, when we said our prayers at the knees of a mother, that we were lifted beyond this visible Nature, beyond these fields and woods and waters, in which, fair though they be, you and I miss something; in which neither you nor I are as happy as the kine in the fields, as the birds on the bough, as the fishes in the water: lifted to a consciousness of a sense vouchsafed to you and to me, not vouchsafed to the kine, to the bird, and the fish,--a sense to comprehend that Nature has a God, and Man has a life hereafter. The bell says that to you and to me. Were that bell a thousand times more musical it could not say that to beast, bird, and fish. Do you understand me, Tom?” Tom remains silent for a minute, and then replies, “I never thought of it before; but, as you put it, I understand.”