Chapter 3 - Page 2

Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and
burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how
many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the
year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more
and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a
condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a
voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church!
At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be
scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They WON'T come,
they WON'T come, they WON'T come! At the five minutes, it
abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for
three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan
of despair.

'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell
stopped.

But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and
the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march
on. 'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How
I have hated this day!'

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his
hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract
which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its
title, why he was going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he
really, in a frock and drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--
and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a
parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference
as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. There was the sleepy Sunday of
his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to
chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally
handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have
bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two
of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was
the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of
face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--
bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and
straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the
drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of
the leaves--as if it, of all books! were a fortification against
sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse.
There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat down
glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a
sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of
the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been
bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of