the wheels seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped off eternity.

Without pause it began again--one--two--three--until at last after a warning

rumble and the scraping of many wheels a thunderous voice, high above us, told

the world that it was the hour of noon.

 

On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and their terrible

sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made me turn stiff with fright when I

heard it in the middle of the night telling a story of fire or flood. In

solitary grandeur it seemed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which

it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of Rotterdam. Around

it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung

the little fellows, who twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of

the country-folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear what the big

world had been doing. But in a corner--all alone and shunned by the others--a

big black bell, silent and stern, the bell of death.

 

Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and even more dangerous than

those we had climbed before, and suddenly the fresh air of the wide heavens. We

had reached the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us the city--a little

toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling hither and thither, each one

intent upon his or her particular business, and beyond the jumble of stones, the

wide greenness of the open country.

 

It was my first glimpse of the big world.