There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with one of those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which I have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love for it.—­Let me tell the superstitious fancy first.  The Puritan “Sabbath,” as everybody knows, began at “sundown” on Saturday evening.  To such observance of it I was born and bred.  As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all.  It was time for work to cease, and for playthings to be put away.  The world of active life passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should sink again beneath the horizon.

It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself most distinctly heard,—­so that I well remember I used to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamp, was peculiar to Saturday evenings.  I don’t know that anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange, childish fancy.

Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood.  It was heard only at times,—­a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast,—­a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles.  I used to wonder what this might be.  Could it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring city?  That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm.  I remember being told, and I suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves, after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.  I should really like to know whether any observing people living ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches,—­in such a town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the Territory of the Massachusetts,—­have ever observed any such sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.

Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare intervals.  I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not generally agreeable voices.  The marrowy organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once