nk and
rubbish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images
and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between the outspread
arms of a kindly saint.

The next floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous
open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the
roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron
bars and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was
the noise of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and
cleansed by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking
of horses' hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing sound
of the patient steam which had been set to do the work of man in
a thousand different ways--they had all been blended into a softly
rustling whisper which provided a beautiful background for the trembling
cooing of the pigeons.

Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And after the
first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel his way with a
cautious foot) there was a new and even greater wonder, the town-clock.
I saw the heart of time. I could hear the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid
seconds--one--two--three--up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise
when all 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 t