Chapter 8

The village tower--'tis joy to me!--I cry, the Lord is here!
The village bells! They fill the soul with ecstasy sincere.
And thus, I sing, the light hath shined to lands in darkness hurled,
Their sound is now in all the earth, their words throughout the world.

Coxe.

Another night past in peace within the settlement of the Hutted Knoll.
The following morning was the Sabbath, and it came forth, balmy,
genial, and mild; worthy of the great festival of the Christian world.
On the subject of religion, captain Willoughby was a little of a
martinet; understanding by liberty of conscience, the right of
improving by the instruction of those ministers who belonged to the
church of England. Several of his labourers had left him because he
refused to allow of any other ministrations on his estate; his doctrine
being that every man had a right to do as he pleased in such matters;
and as he did not choose to allow of schism, within the sphere of his
own influence, if others desired to be schismatics they were at liberty
to go elsewhere, in order to indulge their tastes. Joel Strides and
Jamie Allen were both disaffected to this sort of orthodoxy, and they
had frequent private discussions on its propriety; the former in his
usual wily and jesuitical mode of sneering and insinuating, and the
latter respectfully as related to his master, but earnestly as it
concerned his conscience. Others, too, were dissentients, but with less
repining; though occasionally they would stay away from Mr. Wood's
services. Mike, alone, took an open and manly stand in the matter, and
he a little out-Heroded Herod; or, in other words, he exceeded the
captain himself in strictness of construction. On the very morning we
have just described, he was present at a discussion between the Yankee
overseer and the Scotch mason, in which these two dissenters, the first
a congregationalist, and the last a seceder, were complaining of the
hardships of a ten years' abstinence, during which no spiritual
provender had been fed out to them from a proper source. The Irishman
broke out upon the complainants in a way that will at once let the
reader into the secret of the county Leitrim-man's principles, if he
has any desire to know them.

"Bad luck to all sorts of religion but the right one!" cried Mike, in a
most tolerant spirit. "Who d'ye think will be wishful of hearing mass
and pr'aching that comes from _any_ of your heretick parsons?
Ye're as dape in the mire yerselves, as Mr. Woods is in the woods, and
no one to lade ye out of either, but an evil spirit that would rather
see all mankind br'iling in agony, than dancing at a fair."

"Go to your confessional, Mike," returned Joel, with a sneer--"It's a