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.
And how popular such a summons would be with the ungodly—leaving them in peace to enjoy their Sunday morning nap!
But we are wandering from our subject. Suffice it to say that the object of sounding brass into which Sergeant Wright was looking was not a bell. Neither was it a cannon, for a howitzer of that calibre, or a few smaller pieces of sounding brass, would have prevented the sad tragedy of the Indian captivity, and in that case the events herein chronicled would never have transpired. Sergeant Judah Wright was looking at Mr. Hoyt's brass kettle. He was billetted upon the family, and had so won the hearts of all but the mother, by his ready helpfulness and kindliness of manner, that they had come to consider him as one of their own number, and had almost forgotten the arbitrary way in which their acquaintance had begun. His frequent presence in the kitchen, and assistance in the labors of the family, was not, however, altogether of a disinterested nature, being prompted by the same feeling that caused Jacob's fourteen years of servitude for Rachel to seem but a day—"the love he bore her."
If Jean Ingelow had lived and written at that time, the Sergeant might have borrowed a verse or two to explain his love for Goodman Hoyt's kitchen:
For there his oldest daughter stands,
With downcast eyes and skilful hands,
Before her ironing board.