which the bell-ropes went, I spied two or three thick wires hanging through the same ceiling close to the wall, and right over the box with the keys. The vague suspicion of a discovery dawned upon me. “Have you got the key of the tower?” I asked. “No, sir. But I’ll run home for it at once,” she answered. And rising, she went out in haste. “Run!” thought I, looking after her. “It is a word of the will and the feeling, not of the body.” But I was mistaken. The dear old creature had no sooner got outside of the church-yard, within which, I presume, she felt that she must be decorous, than she did run, and ran well too. I was on the point of starting after her at full speed, to prevent her from hurting herself, but reflecting that her own judgment ought to be as good as mine in such a case, I returned, and sitting down on her seat, awaited her reappearance, gazing at the ceiling. There I either saw or imagined I saw signs of openings corresponding in number and position with those in the lid under me. In about three minutes the old woman returned, panting but not distressed, with a great crooked old key in her hand. Why are all the keys of a church so crooked? I did not ask her that question, though. What I said to her, was-- “You shouldn’t run like that. I am in no hurry.” “Be you not, sir? I thought, by the way you spoke, you be taken with a longing to get a-top o’ the tower, and see all about you like. For you see, sir, fond as I be of the old church, I du feel sometimes as if she’d smother me; and then nothing will do but I must get at the top of the old tower. And then, what with the sun, if there be any sun, and what with the fresh air which there always be up there, sir,--it du always be fresh up there, sir,” she repeated, “I come back down again blessing the old church for its tower.” As she spoke she was toiling up the winding staircase after me, where there was just room enough for my shoulders to get through by turning themselves a little across the lie of the steps. They were very high, but she kept up with me bravely, bearing out her statement that she was no stranger to them. As I ascended, however, I was not thinking of her, but of what she had said. Strange to tell, the significance of the towers or spires of our churches had never been clear to me before. True, I was quite awake to their significance, at least to that of the spires, as fingers pointing ever upwards to “regions mild of calm and serene air, Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, Which men call Earth;” but I had not thought of their symbolism as lifting one up above the church itself into a region where no church is wanted because the Lord God almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.