Change ringing does not appear to have On a church bell in Wiltshire, 1619: been invented until the latter part of the "Be strong in faythe, praise God well- another, in Warwickshire, 1675: When to and from their worke to go." "Of. all. the. bells. in. Benet. I. am. the. best. And. yet. for. my. casting. the. parish. paid. lest." On the smallest of a peal of six, in Wiltshire, cast in 1666: On "Though I am the least, I will be heard as well as the reast." "All you of Bathe that hear me sound one in Northamptonshire, 1601 : To the Church of Hetford frank and free." Chime ringing, or the ringing of a set of eight bells or more by one person, the carillons à clavier, is of comparatively modern origin, and the invention of carillon machinery of still more recent date. Our engraving on the previous page shows an ad- On one in Hampshire, 1695: mirable contrivance, the invention of the Messrs. Warner, of England. It will be seen that by simply turning a barrel, larger but similar to that of a music-box or hand-organ, one person can, with faultless precision, chime eight or any other number of bells. The inscriptions on old European bells are too quaint to be passed by. Some are epigrammatic gems, as, for example, this on a village bell cast centuries ago: And this: "Gaudemus gaudentibus, Dolemus dolentibus." "We rejoice with the joyous, "Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, conjugo clerum; "Samuel Knight made this ring In Binstead steeple for to ding." Here is a queer inscription, of a late date, on a bell in Devonshire: "Recast by John Taylor and Son, Who the best prize for church bells won In London, 1-8-5 and 1." On the great bell of Rouen, France, presented to St. Mary's Church by George, Archbishop of Rouen, is this inscription: "Je suis nommée George d'Amboise, "I am called George d'Amboise, who weigh over thirty- One of three bells in Orkney, Scotland, cast in 1528, bears the following: "Maid be master robert maxvell, bischop of Orknay, ye second zier of his consecration ye zier of God Im Ve XXVIII, ye XV. zier of Kyng James ye V. be robert Borthvyk; maid al thre in ye castel of Edynburgh." On the great bell in Glasgow cathedral is done in the best style of the bell-founder's this: art. "In the year of grace, 1583, Marcus Knox, a mer- In many of the old towers of English chant in Glasgow, zealous for the interest of the Re-churches are found painted or written in formed Religion, caused me to be fabricated in Hol- old English script "Laws of the Belfry." land for the use of his fellow-citizens of Glasgow, and placed me with solemnity in the Tower of their CatheFor example. In St. Andrew's Church, dral. My function was announced by the impress on Plymouth, is the following: my bosom: 'Me audito venias doctrinam sanctam ut discas,' and I was taught to proclaim the hours of unheeded time. 195 years had sounded these awful warnings when I was broken by the hands of inconsiderate and unskillful men. In the year 1790 I was cast into the furnace, refounded at London, and returned to my sacred vocation. Reader! thou also shall know a resurrection; may it be to eternal life. Thomas Mears fecit, London, 1790." "Would men like me join and agree, "Possessed of deep sonorous tone, "Great,' may we say, with Dr. Southey, are the mysteries of bell-ringing.' The very terms of the art are enough to frighten an amateur from any attempt at explanation. Hunting, dodging, snapping, and placemaking; plain bobs, bob-triples, bob-majors, bob-majors reversed, double bob-majors, and even up to grandsirebob-cators. Heigh-ho! who can hope to translate all this gibberish to the uninitiated ?"-The Bell. By the Rev. Alfred Gatty, Vicar of Ecclesfield. "Nos resonare hibet Pietas, Mors, atq. Voluptas." Now round letts go with pleasure to the ear, Another set of these rules, dated 1627, is "You ringers all observe these orders well, He forfiets 12 pence who turns ore a bell: You gallants, then, yt on purpose come to ring You must ring truly with hande and eare Or else your forflets surely pay Full speedily, and that withaut delay The superstitions regarding submerged and buried bells have given many beautiful legends to the lovers of antiquarian lore. The tradition of the Inchcape bell, which was hung by the abbots of Aberbrothock on the Inchcape rock at the mouth of the Frith of Tay, has been repeated in song and story until it is familiar to every school-boy. The legend of the Jersey bells is not so hackneyed. It runs thus: Many years ago the twelve parish churches of Jersey each possessed a valuable and beautiful peal of bells. But during the civil wars the states resolved to sell these bells to defray the heavy expenses of their army. Accordingly, the bells were collected and sent to France for that purpose; but on the passage the ship foundered, and every thing was lost. Thus Heaven punished the sacrilege. Since then, before a storm, the bells ring up from the deep; and to this day the fishermen of St. Ouen's Bay always go to the edge of the water before embarking, to listen if they can hear the bells upon the wind; and if those warning notes are heard, nothing will induce them to leave the shore; if all is quiet they fearlessly set sail. ""Tis an ocean of death to the mariner, For the foaming surge is his winding-sheet, Four hundred years ago the old church of St. Andrew, standing about a mile and a half from Romford, England, was pulled down. Its site in the meadows is still known as the "Old Church." On this spot, says tradition, the bells may be heard every year on St. Andrew's Day, ringing right merrily in honor of the patron saint. Near Raleigh, in Nottinghamshire, England, is a valley, said to have been caused by an earthquake many centuries ago, which swallowed up a village with all the people, their houses, and the church. It was once a custom for the people of the country-side to assemble in this valley on Christmas-day to listen to the ringing of the bells beneath their feet. The sound, they asserted, could be distinctly heard by putting the ear close to the ground. charmed my listening ear at Pascagoula were inexpressibly sweet, like that of "silver strings in hollow shells," and sad as the wail of a penitent siren. "What do you think makes that music, Uncle Cæsar?" I said to the old African slave boatman that was rowing my boat. "Deed, missis, dey say it are dat bell what done sunk out dar in a ship, leastways a wessel o' some kind or nudder. De bell was de cap'n's bell, an' he war a mighty weeked man, an' one night arter he had been ashore a- cuttin' up awful, he tu'ned in, an' afore de day done broke, de ship went down, an' was neber seed no moah. Sense dat day dat bell has been tollin' dat kine o' ghost music mos' ebery night in de warm wedder. 'Pears to me mighty singler, dat story. Kase de sound are not de sound of a bell. It's moah like a church orgin, playin' a mighty sollum kine o' tune too. Enty, missis?" It was a truly good description that old Uncle Cæsar gave of it. It brought back a memory which, from the very dissimilarity of the sounds, gave rise to one of those mental comparisons we sometimes make. No untraveled American can appreciate it fully. It was the music of what Victor Hugo calls an opera of steeples. We give the description entire from his Quasimodo: "In an ordinary way the noise issuing from Paris At Kilginiol, near Blackpool, is a place in the daytime is the talking of the city; at night it called "The Church," where, on Christmas-is the breathing of the city; in this case it is the singeve, any one can hear the merry peal of the bells ringing away down in the bowels of the earth. ing of the city. Lend your ear to this opera of steeples. Diffuse over the whole the buzzing of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests, placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down with a demi-tint all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you These superstitions regarding submerged and buried bells are not confined to Great Britain. I once listened in awe and wonder to some mysterious music that came float-know any thing more rich, more gladdening, more dazing over the waters of Pascagoula Bay. Any inhabitant of Mobile will corroborate this statement. There the sounds are called by the Mobilians mermaids' music. Those that zling, than that tumult of bells, that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones, breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city, which is but one orchestra; than that symphony, rushing and roaring like a tempest." TH THE WASHINGTON ELM. HE English colonists, Puritan and Cav-| alier, who peopled our coast in the early part of the seventeenth century were always shrewd in the selection of sites for their little towns and cities. Commercial or agricultural advantages guided their choice, as a rule; but once in a while they picked out some select location for the express purpose of making it a colonial capital. Something of the sort was the case with the Massachusetts village of Newtown, which has since developed into the American Cambridge. It was not exactly born great, but Governor Winthrop and his associates early tried to thrust greatness upon it. A scholar generally calm and discreet lately declared that the pre-Revolutionary Cambridge was "the first capital of our infant republic, the cradle of our nascent liberty, the hearth of our kindling patriotism." At any rate, this is just what, in a different sense, the Puritans of 1630 wanted it to be. Boston, then a small town with no special advantages save its excellent harbor, had not at that time been fixed upon as the seat of government; and one day in 1630, accordingly, Governor Winthrop and LieutenantGovernor Dudley jumped on horseback and explored the plains and swamps and forests to the westward in search of a capital. The spot they finally picked out, with the help of some assistant magnates, lay about three miles west of Charlestown, on the banks of the tortuous little river since sung by poets, and already named the Charles by Captain John Smith, who never saw it. The elect location seemed to Winthrop "a fit place for a beautiful town;" and accordingly, on the 29th day of December a goodly num ber of persons bound themselves to build houses there early in the spring of the following year. The village they named Newtown, and laid out regularly in squares, the streets bearing such simple names as Creek, Wood, and Water, while there were, as lesser ways, Marsh Lane, Back Lane, and Crooked Lane. That was before the days of aristocratic thoroughfares like Brattle and Craigie and Ellery and Fayerweather streets. Early in 1631 the houses began to rise, and Governor Winthrop set up the frame of his dwelling on the very spot where he had first pitched his tent. But the people of Boston had been promised by the Governor at the very first that he would never move away any where unless they accompanied him, and of this promise they now reminded him in pretty strenuous terms. Bound by two solemn agreements, and under the necessity of breaking one of them, Winthrop's conscience gave preference to the one first made; and so in the fall of 1631 he disap GOVERNOR WINTHROP. pointed his Newtown friends by taking down the frame of his unfinished dwelling and setting it up in Boston. LieutenantGovernor Dudley's house was completed, meanwhile, and his family installed therein; and he and the rest frigidly let Winthrop return to Boston without offering to accompany him. This affair, as was natural, caused a coolness between Winthrop and Dudley, which was not removed for several years. The Governor's excuse for quitting Newtown was somewhat strengthened in his own mind by the fact that Chickatabut, the chief of the neighboring Indians, had promised to be friendly, so that the necessity of having a fortified settlement in the country, three miles west, was somewhat less urgent. The commercial prospects of Boston, too, had begun to look brighter than Newtown's. Making the best of their opportunities, the remaining settlers proved so thrifty, and courtly too, that they soon began to deserve the praise accorded them by an English writer some years afterward, who warmly described the place as "one of the neatest and best-compacted towns in New England, having many fair structures, with many handsome-contrived streets." "The inhabitants," added this complimentary tourist, "are most of them very rich." In 1632 a number of settlers from Braintree, England, came to Newtown. The quarrel between Winthrop and Dudley continuing, the ministers justified the Lieutenant-Governor by ordering Winthrop to get a clergyman for the town, failing in which he should pay Dudley £20. This sum Winthrop had to render, but the pacified Dudley was magnanimous in his triumph, and returned it with a polite note in which he courteously intimated that he would rather lose £100 than Winthrop's friendship. Their difficulties settled, the two magnates lived on friendly terms thereafter. By 1634 the Newtown people began to complain of being overcrowded, and loudly talked, some of them, of moving to Connecticut. To that region the original Braintree settlers, to the number of one hundred, accordingly departed two years later, headed by their minister, the Rev. Thomas Hooker, and driving with them 160 cattle. The same year, 1636, this migratory church was replaced in Newtown by a permanent organization under the Rev. Thomas Shepard, a recent arrival from England; and the fortunes of the town were also bettered by the establishment in it of the colony's first school, endowed by the General Court with £400. Nearly all the ministers of the colony happened to be from the University of Cambridge in England, and the most of them, too, from a single one of its colleges, Emanuel. The neighboring Charlestown clergyman, the Rev. John Harvard, a scholarly and gentle graduate of Emanuel, took from the first a hearty interest in the Newtown school; and dying in 1638, he left to it his well-selected library of three hundred volumes and half his fortune. This bequest amounted, it is supposed, to nearly £800, or twice as much as the original gift of the General Court; and such was the effect of so magnificent a gift that the colonists determined to raise the school to the grade of a college, and to give to it the name of its benefactor. The same year, too, the Cambridge graduates concluded to express their esteem for their own university by changing |