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.

Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have
gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard
work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climbing
a few stairs.

Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the
land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind