Cast for a lightship station on the North Sea coast, The Vigil is the only bell in the register commissioned to be heard by people who hoped never to hear her. She rang fog: two strokes, a pause, two strokes, hour after hour, whenever the visibility dropped below a mile — a mechanical striker doing the work, the keepers on watch below counting her the way sailors offshore counted her.
The commission specified a voice that would carry through saturated air, and the tenth founder tuned her accordingly: a true-harmonic casting with the nominal — the partial the ear takes for the strike note — brought up unusually strong, since high, exact frequencies read best against the flat roar of the sea. She was cut once on the lathe, sealed against salt with wax the keepers renewed each spring, and rung by machinery for nineteen years until the station was automated and her work passed to an electric horn.
She came home to the foundry in 1987, unweathered under her wax, her measurements unchanged from the day she shipped. The register lists her as retired but sound. Bells do not sleep; she is simply between watches.