ear the
church bells, faintly now, and now very clear; there is the First Church
bell, and the Baptist; there is St. John's, on a higher note, and
Trinity, a little lower. After a time even the bells cease, and there is
no sound but the wind in the big maples and the bees as they drone among
the flower heads.

Sunday, at least Sunday on a Connecticut farm, has a distinct quality of
its own. I can hardly say what it means to me--no one, I suppose, could
say all that it means. To call it a day of rest does not individualize
it enough. It has to be described not so much in terms of rest as of
balance and height. I think of the week as a long, sweeping curve, like
the curve of a swift, deep wave at sea, and Sunday is the crest, the
moment of poise, before one is drawn down into the next great concave,
then up again, to pause and look off, and it is Sunday once more.

The weather does not matter. If it rains, you get one kind of pause and
outlook--the intimate, indoor kind. If the sun shines, you get another
kind--wide and bright. And what you do does not matter so long as it is
different from the week, and so long as it expresses and develops that
peculiar Sunday quality of balance and height. I can imagine nothing
drearier than seven days all alike, and seven more, and seven more!
Sundays are the big beads on the chain. They need not be all of the same
color, but there must be the big beads to satisfy the eye and the
finger-tip.

And a New England Sunday always is different. Whatever changes may have
come or may be coming elsewhere, in New England Sunday has its own
atmosphere. Over the fields and woods and rocks there is a sense of
poise between reminiscence and expectancy. The stir of the morning
church-going brightens but does not mar this. It adds the human
note--rather not a note, but a quiet chord of many tones. And after it
comes a hush. The early afternoon of a New England Sunday is the most
absolutely quiet thing imaginable. It is the precise middle of the wave
crest, the moment when motion ceases.

From that point time begins to stir again. Life resumes. There is a
certain amount of desultory intercourse between farm and farm. If
people are engaged, or mean to be, they drive out together; if they are
married, they go home to "his folks" or "her folks." Friends walk
together, farmers saunter along the road or back on the farms to "take a
look" at things. Consciously or not, and usually not, there is a kind of