ding. The man stood awestruck. He was a good player himself, but he
had never heard such music before. 'Who is there?' he cried. 'If it is
not an angel or the devil, it must be Handel!' When he discovered that
it WAS the great musician, he was still more mystified! 'But how is
this?' he said. 'You have done impossible things--no ten fingers on
earth can play the passages you have given. Human fingers couldn't
control all the keys and stops!' 'I know it,' said Handel coolly, 'and
for that reason, I was forced to strike some notes with the end of my
nose.' Donder! just think how the old organist must have stared!"

"Hey! What?" exclaimed Jacob, startled when Peter's animated voice
suddenly became silent.

"Haven't you heard me, you rascal?" was the indignant rejoinder.

"Oh, yes--no. The fact is, I heard you at first. I'm awake now, but I do
believe I've been walking beside you half asleep," stammered Jacob, with
such a doleful, bewildered look on his face that Peter could not help
laughing.

The Man With Four Heads

After leaving the church, the boys stopped nearby in the open
marketplace, to look at the bronze statue of Laurens Janszoon Coster,
who is believed by the Dutch to have been the inventor of printing. This
is disputed by those who award the same honor to Johannes Gutenberg of
Mayence; while many maintain that Faustus, a servant of Coster, stole
his master's wooden types on a Christmas eve, when the latter was at
church, and fled with his booty and his secret, to Mayence. Coster was
a native of Haarlem, and the Hollanders are naturally anxious to secure
the credit of the invention for their illustrious townsman. Certain it
is that the first book he printed is kept by the city in a silver case
wrapped in silk and is shown with great caution as a precious relic. It
is said that he first conceived the idea of printing from cutting his
name upon the bark of a tree and afterward pressing a piece of paper
upon the characters.

Of course, Lambert and his English friend fully discussed this subject.
They also had a rather warm argument concerning another invention.
Lambert declared that the honor of giving both the telescope and the
microscope to the world lay between Metius and Jansen, both Hollanders,
while Ben as stoutly insisted that Roger Bacon, an English monk of
the thirteenth century, "wrote out the whole thing, sir, perfect
descriptions of microscopes and telescopes, too, long before either of