Page:Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1888).djvu/71

 heard the yelling and shouting outside. They flew into the tower, and out again when they saw the crowd below, and glared into the church windows, making the most hideous cries and caws.

“King Canute was kneeling and praying before the altar. His brothers, Eric and Benedict stood by him with drawn swords, but the King’s servant, the false-hearted Blake, betrayed his master. He showed the wild crowd outside, the window through which a stone could reach his master. The stone was aimed at the King, and in a few moments he fell dead!

“The cries and yells of the incensed peasants and of the frightened birds were heard by me, and I joined in the din by singing ‘Ding dong, ding dong.’

“The church bell hangs high, and can see far and near. The language of the birds is understood by the bell, and the wind, which knows everything, roars round the tower and through the windows and loop-holes, and gets all its knowledge from the air, and the bell understands, and rings it out to the whole world, ‘Ding dong, ding dong.’

“But at last,” said the bell, “the work became too heavy for me. I could no longer ring out for the whole world to hear. I became so heavy that the beam broke, and I flew out through the air to the place where the river is deepest, and where the water sprite dwells, solitary and alone, and year by vear I tell him all I have heard and what I know. Ding dong, ding dong.”

All this is what my grandmother told me, but the bell’s deep tones have a melancholy sound when they are heard from the river by Odense.

But our mother says there is no bell in the water that can ring of itself, and that the water sprite does not live in the water, because there is no such thing as a water sprite, and when other church bells sound so sweetly, it is the air that makes them sound and not the bells alone, even when they ring loudly.

Grandmother says the bell itself told her it was the air that made it sound. So they are both agreed. Therefore take care and think before you say or do anything, and be sure it is right, for the air knows everything—it is over us,—it is in us,—and around us.

It tells of our thoughts and actions, and speaks more distinctly of them than the bell in the depths of any river could do, for it rings out in the vault of heaven, and will do so far and near, for ever and ever, even after the bells of heaven are sounding “Ding dong, ding dong.”