the town, and we gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage
it, and do everything we can think of to perfect it,
and then spoil it all by putting a bell on it which
afflicts everybody who hears it, giving some the
headache, others St. Vitus's dance, and the rest the
blind staggers.

An American village at ten o'clock on a summer
Sunday is the quietest and peacefulest and holiest
thing in nature; but it is a pretty different thing
half an hour later. Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells"
stands incomplete to this day; but it is well enough
that it is so, for the public reciter or "reader" who
goes around trying to imitate the sounds of the
various sorts of bells with his voice would find him-
self "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell--
as Joseph Addison would say. The church is always
trying to get other people to reform; it might
not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way
of example. It is still clinging to one or two things
which were useful once, but which are not useful
now, neither are they ornamental. One is the bell-
ringing to remind a clock-caked town that it is
church-time, and another is the reading from the
pulpit of a tedious list of "notices" which every-
body who is interested has already read in the
newspaper. The clergyman even reads the hymn
through--a relic of an ancient time when hymn-
books were scarce and costly; but everybody has
a hymn-book, now, and so the public reading is no
longer necessary. It is not merely unnecessary,
it is generally painful; for the average clergyman
could not fire into his congregation with a shotgun

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