he highest gallery. Above us the
sky. Below us the city--a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily
crawling hither and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular
business, and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the
open country.

It was my first glimpse of the big world.

Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to the top
of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard work, but it repaid in full
the mere physical exertion of climbing a few stairs.

Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the land and the
sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind friend the watchman,
who lived in a small shack, built in a sheltered corner of the gallery.
He looked after the clock and was a father to the bells, and he warned
of fires, but he enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and
thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost fifty
years before and he had rarely read a book, but he had lived on the top
of his tower for so many years that he had absorbed the wisdom of that
wide world which surrounded him on all sides.

History he knew well, for it was a living thing with him. "There," he
would say, pointing to a bend of the river, "there, my boy, do you see
those trees? That is where the Prince of Orange cut the dikes to drown
the land and save Leyden." Or he would tell me the tale of the old
Meuse, until the broad river ceased to be a convenient harbour and
became a wonderful highroad, carrying the ships of De Ruyter and Tromp
upon that famous last voyage, when they gave their lives that the sea
might be free to all.

Then there were the little villages, clustering around the protecting
church which once, many years ago, had been the home of their Patron
Saints. In the distance we could see the leaning tower of Delft. Within
sight of its high arches, William the Silent had been murdered and there
Grotius had learned to construe his first Latin sentences. And still
further away, the long low body of the church of Gouda, the early home
of the man whose wit had proved mightier than the armies of many an
emperor, the charity-boy whom the world came to know as Erasmus.

Finally the silver line of the endless sea and as a contrast,
immediately below us, the patchwork of roofs and chimneys and houses
and gardens and hospitals and schools and railways, which we called our
home. But the tower showed us the old home in a new light. The confu