nd shining as stars in Otto's happy eyes.
They were mounted in the great belfry, and for the test-chime Otto
had employed the best bell-ringers in the city.

It was a lovely May morning; and, almost crazed with excitement and
anxiety, Otto, accompanied by a few chosen friends, waited outside
the city for the first notes of the Harmony Chime. At some distance
he thought he could better judge of the merits of his work.

At last the first notes were struck, clear, sonorous, and so
melodious that his friends cried aloud with delight. But with finger
upraised for silence, and eyes full of ecstatic delight, Otto stood
like a statue until the last note died away. Then his friends caught
him as he fell forward in a swoon,--a swoon so like death that no
one thought he would recover.

But it was not death, and he came out of it with a look of serene
peace on his face that it had not worn since boyhood. He was married
to Gertrude that very day, but every one noticed that the ecstasy
which transfigured his face seemed to be drawn more from the sound
of the bells than the sweet face beside him.

"Don't you see a spell is cast on him as soon as they begin to
ring?" said one, after the bells had ceased to be a wonder. "If he
is walking, he stops short, and if he is working, the work drops and
a strange fire comes in his eyes; and I have seen him shudder all
over as it he had an ague."

In good truth, the bells seemed to have drawn a portion of Otto's
life to them. When the incursions of the war forced him to fly from
Ghent with his family, his regrets were not for his injured
property, but that he could not hear the bells.

He was absent two years, and when he returned it was to find the
cathedral almost a ruin, and the bells gone no one knew where. From
that moment a settled melancholy took possession of Otto. He made no
attempt to retrieve his losses; in fact, he gave up work altogether,
and would sit all day with his eyes fixed on the ruined belfry.

People said he was melancholy mad, and I suppose it was the truth;
but he was mad with a kind of gentle patience very sad to see. His
mother had died during their exile, and now his wife, unable with
all her love to rouse him from his torpor, faded slowly away. He did
not notice her sickness, and his poor numbed brain seemed
imperfectly to comprehend her death. But he followed her to the
grave, and turn