"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity"--which is love--"I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." It was Sergeant Wright who repeated the words thoughtfully to himself, nearly two hundred years ago, while his gaze was riveted upon the glowing rim and cavernous hollow of a ponderous brazen object. It was not a bell, though there was metal enough in it to have formed a very respectable one for the village church. At that early day bells were not common in New England; in the seaport towns, that formed the colony of Plymouth, the faithful were summoned to church by the blowing of a conch shell; at other towns there are records of a "_peece_" being fired, or of a drummer being paid to beat a reveille for sleepy souls. In Deerfield, where the events we are about to chronicle took place, the practice seems to have been to simply hoist a flag at the time appointed for public service. Any of these means, except the drum, appears on some accounts preferable to the modern church bell. To any one who has resided in a Catholic country, where the ringing of bells, from matins to vespers, is incessant, to one with recent memories of college days, of being rung up in the morning before having his sleep out, rung to prayers before he had finished his breakfast, rung to recitation before he had mastered his lesson, and rung to bed before reaching the "Yours _truly_" of his love letter, the Sabbath bell is not likely to suggest ideas of a devotional character. After all, is it not essentially a relic of barbarism, a pagan institution like the beating of gongs in the Chinese ceremony of chinchinning the moon? The blowing of the conch shell is not open to the objection of degrading association; it must have called to mind the trumpets and rams' horns in the awe-inspiring Hebrew ceremonial. Fancy instead of the ding-dong of sounding brass in most village churches, that can sometimes hardly be distinguished from the locomotive bell, the clear liquid notes of a silver bugle, similar in character to one of the musical infantry calls, flung by the echoes from hill to hill, and dying faintly away over the meadows and along the river. Even the custom of firing a cannon, one great noise, heard at the furthest boundaries of the parish, and then done with, would be better than the continual repetition of the strokes of a bell, now violent and quick, as though calling out all the hose and hook and ladder companies of the fire department, now slowly dying away, tantalizing the listener with the expectation that now at last they are really going to cease, only to bitterly disappoint him by breaking out again with renewed clamor. Most beautiful of all must have been the silent lifting of the flag, a symbol which evangelist Bliss has taken from the signal service in "Hold the Fort": Wave the answer back to heaven, By Thy grace we will.