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.