The church of this village-like town is one of its chief
attractions; it is a very old and stately building, and its
perpendicular tower, nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the
noblest in England. It has a magnificent peal of bells, and
on a Sunday afternoon they were ringing, filling and flooding
that hollow in the hills, seeming to make the houses and trees
and the very earth to tremble with the glorious storm of
sound. Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that
runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to
a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are
precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods.
As I walked through the cleft the musical roar of the bells
followed, and was like a mighty current flowing through and
over me; but as I came out the sound from behind ceased
suddenly and was now in front, coming back from the hills
before me. A sound, but not the same--not a mere echo; and
yet an echo it was, the most wonderful I had ever heard.
For now that great tempest of musical noise, composed of a
multitude of clanging notes with long vibrations, overlapping
and mingling and clashing together, seemed at the same time
one and many--that tempest from the tower which had
mysteriously ceased to be audible came back in strokes or
notes distinct and separate and multiplied many times. The
sound, the echo, was distributed over the whole face of the
steep hill before me, and was changed in character, and it was
as if every one of those thousands of oak trees had a peal of
bells in it, and that they were raining that far-up bright
spiritual tree music down into the valley below. As I stood
listening it seemed to me that I had never heard anything so