"Ding-dong! ding-dong!" This was one of the bell's stories:—
"There came up to the tower one day an idiot servant of the bishop; and when I, the bell, who am cast in hard and heavy metal, swung about and pealed, I could have broken his head, for he seated himself immediately under me, and began to play with two sticks, exactly as if it had been a stringed instrument, and he sang to it thus: 'Now I may venture to sing aloud what elsewhere I dare not whisper—sing of all that is kept hidden behind locks and bolts. Yonder it is cold and damp. The rats eat the living bodies. No one knows of it; no one hears of it—not even now, when the bell is pouring forth its loudest peal—ding-dong! ding-dong!'
"There was a king: he was called Knud. He humbled himself both before bishops and monks; but as he unjustly oppressed the people, and laid heavy taxes on them, they armed themselves with all sorts of weapons, and chased him away as if he had been a wild beast. He sought shelter in the church, and had the doors and windows closed. The furious multitude surrounded the sacred edifice, as I heard related; the crows and the ravens, and the jackdaws to boot, became scared by the noise and the tumult; they flew up into the tower, and out again; they looked on the multitude below, they looked also in at the church windows, and shrieked out what they saw.
"King Knud knelt before the altar and prayed; his brothers Erik and Benedict stood guarding him with their drawn swords; but the king's servitor, the false Blake, betrayed his lord. They knew outside where he could be reached. A stone was cast in through the window at him, and the king lay dead. There were shouts and cries among the angry crowd, and cries among the flocks of frightened birds; and I joined them too. I pealed forth, 'Ding-dong! ding-dong!'
"The church bell hangs high, sees far around, receives visits from birds, and understands their language. To it whispers the wind through the wickets and apertures, and through every little chink; and the wind knows everything. He hears it from the air, for it encompasses all living things; it even enters into the lungs of human beings—it hears every word and every sigh. The air knows all, the wind repeats all, and the bell understands their speech, and rings it forth to the whole world—'Ding dong! ding dong!'
"But all this was too much for me to hear and to know. I had not strength enough to ring it all out. I became so wearied, so heavy, that the beam from which I hung broke, and I flew through the luminous air down to where the river is deepest, where the merman dwells alone in solitude; and here I am, year after year, relating to him what I have seen and what I have heard. 'Ding-dong! ding-dong!'"
Thus rang the chimes from "The Bell's Hollow" in the Odensee river, as my grandmother declares.
But our schoolmaster says there is no bell ringing down there, for it could not be; and there is no merman down there, for there are no mermen; and, when all the church bells are ringing loudly, he says that it is not the bells, but the air that makes the sound. My grandmother told me that the bell also said this; so, since the schoolmaster and the bell agree in this, no doubt it is true.
The air knows everything. It is round us, it is in us; it speaks of our thoughts and our actions; and it proclaims them farther than did the bell now down in the Hollow in Odensee river, where the merman dwells—it proclaims all out into the great vault of heaven, far, far away, even into eternity, up to where the glorious bells of paradise peal in tones unknown to mortal ears.
