What the next
issue will be, no one can tell; but this is about what we
are at present."
We cannot imagine what the brethren could have been thinking about
when they ordered the new bell that hangs in the tower of Plymouth
Church. It is the most superfluous article in the known world. The
New-Yorker who steps on board the Fulton ferry-boat about ten o'clock
on Sunday morning finds himself accompanied by a large crowd of people
who bear the visible stamp of strangers, who are going to Henry Ward
Beecher's church. You can pick them out with perfect certainty. You
see the fact in their countenances, in their dress, in their demeanor,
as well as hear it in words of eager expectation. They are the kind of
people who regard wearing-apparel somewhat in the light of its
utility, and are not crushed by their clothes. They are the sort of
people who take the "Tribune," and get up courses of lectures in the
country towns. From every quarter of Brooklyn, in street cars and on
foot, streams of people are converging toward the same place. Every
Sunday morning and evening, rain or shine, there is the same
concourse, the same crowd at the gates before they are open, and the
same long, laborious effort to get thirty-five hundred people into a
building that will seat but twenty-seven hundred.
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