That was the last time in my whole life that I made a waterfall.
CHAPTER XI
LOCKED IN
Right below our old house on the hillside stands the church. It is a little wooden church, white-painted and low, with irregular windows, one low and another high, over the whole church. The doors are low and even the tower is low; the spire scarcely reaches up over the big maple-trees, as we can see from our windows. But then the maple-trees are tremendously big.
Every one in town says that the bells in our church tower are remarkable. They are considered unusually musical, and I think they are, too; and nothing could be more fun than to stand up in the tower when those great bells are being rung!
It is awfully thrilling—exactly as if your ear-drums would be split. When you put your fingers in your ears, draw them quickly out, stuff them in again—it is like a roaring ocean of sound. You should just hear it!
It is great fun to slip in after old Peter, the bellows-blower, when he is going up to ring the bells; to grope your way up the steep worm-eaten stairs with cobwebs in every corner,—and the higher you go the narrower and steeper are the stairs; to hide yourself back of the timbers and in the corners so that Peter sha'n't see you; to stand there in that tremendous bell-clanging and then to rush down over the old stairs as if you were crazy, before Peter has shut the tower windows again and shuffled his way down.
Peter would be furious if he saw us, you know. However, he has seen us sometimes, for all our painstaking, though he can't hear us—he is deaf as a post—and he certainly can scold; and when he scolds he threatens us with all the worst things he knows of—telling the minister and the dean and everybody.