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.

But his scolding doesn't make much difference. Our clambering up into
the tower certainly can't do the least harm to any one; so, even after
he has scolded us, the next time we see him slinking along and squeezing
himself in through the church door (he never opens it wider than just
enough to push himself through exactly like a little black mouse
creeping through a crack), we are right after him, you may be sure.
Sometimes there will be ten or twelve of us, without his knowing a thing
about it.

But once I got rather the worst of it when I stole up to the church
tower after Peter. It was grewsome, I can tell you, for only think, I
got locked in the church! I have been up in the tower since, just the
same, only I don't dare to go alone any more, t