Peter turned reluctantly; he would not detain the boys against their will. All but Ben were casting rather reproachful glances upon him.
"Well, boys," he whispered, "we will go. Softly now."
"That's the greatest thing I've seen or heard since I've been in Holland!" cried Ben, enthusiastically, as soon as they reached the open air. "It's glorious!"
Ludwig and Carl laughed slyly at the English boy's wartaal, or gibberish; Jacob yawned; Peter gave Ben a look that made him instantly feel that he and Peter were not so very different after all, though one hailed from Holland and the other from England; and Lambert, the interpreter, responded with a brisk—
"You may well say so. I believe there are one or two organs nowadays that are said to be as fine; but for years and years this organ of St. Bavon was the grandest in the world."
"Do you know how large it is?" asked Ben. "I noticed that the church itself was prodigiously high and that the organ filled the end of the great aisle almost from floor to roof."
"That's true," said Lambert, "and how superb the pipes looked—just like grand columns of silver. They're only for show, you know; the real pipes are behind them, some big enough for a man to crawl through, and some smaller than a baby's whistle. Well, sir, for size, the church is higher than Westminster Abbey, to begin with, and, as you say, the organ makes a tremendous show even then. Father told me last night that it is one hundred and eight feet high, fifty feet broad, and has over five thousand pipes; it has sixty-four stops, if you know what they are, I don't, and three keyboards."
"Good for you!" said Ben. "You have a fine memory. My head is a perfect colander for figures; they slip through as fast as they're poured in. But other facts and historical events stay behind—that's some consolation."
"There we differ," returned Van Mounen. "I'm great on names and figures, but history, take it altogether, seems to me to be the most hopeless kind of a jumble."
Meantime Carl and Ludwig were having a discussion concerning some square wooden monuments they had observed in the interior of the church; Ludwig declared that each bore the name of the person buried beneath, and Carl insisted that they had no names, but only the heraldic arms of the deceased painted on a black ground, with the date of the death in gilt letters.