“Matter?” repeated the astonished principal. “Are you really here? I freely confess that the occurrence exceeds the moderate capacity of my comprehension. Just listen to that bell!”
“Something the matter with it, beyond a doubt,” said Zeb. “It don’t toll as if it was meant for a funeral. If it is, I should say that funeral had been drinking too much.”
Dr. Dryer could not wait for any more of Zeb Fuller’s moralizing, but pulled his cotton night-cap closer over his ears as he hurried away towards the Academy.
Others, less thoughtful than himself of the probable source of all Ogleport mischief, had directed their steps and energies to what seemed the sure capture of the untimely bell-ringer, whoever he might be.
There came in the puzzle.
Not a door was open, front or rear. Every window was closed. There was not a sign of human entrance about the entire exterior of the Academy building.
George Brayton had the key of the rear entrance, but even while some of the rest had gone for lights, the doctor arrived, and with him the means of throwing open the great front doors.
Then, indeed, a flood of splendid moonlight was poured in upon the mystery—only moonshine leaves every mystery as badly off as it finds it.
There, in the middle of the main hall, from which on either side the schoolrooms opened, a few paces only from the front doorway, stood Dr. Dryer’s favorite dun heifer, with the bell-rope firmly webbed around her horns and a peck-measure of green apples on the floor within what would have been easy reach but for the hindrance of that rope.
Small blame to the heifer if she smelled those apples and strove to reach them, and even less to the rope and the bell if among them they waked up all Ogleport as a consequence.