202 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



being rung, they assured me, however, they did not 

 object, and so to the belfry I climbed, and waited, a 

 little nervously, as some musical enthusiast might wait 

 to hear a symphony from the days of the giants, com- 

 posed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky, to be 

 performed on "instruments of unknown form" and 

 gigantic size. I was not disappointed; the effect was 

 too awful for words and was less musical than I had 

 thought it would be. In less than three minutes it 

 became unendurable, and then I slipped out on to the 

 roof to save myself from some tremendous disaster. 

 In a minute I was back again, and with intervals of 

 escape to the roof I remained till the ringing finished. 

 I could not have stood it otherwise, and as it was, I 

 feared every moment that it would deafen me per- 

 manently so that I would no more hear birds sing. 

 That, to me, would be the end of all things. Pollock, 

 in the article mentioned above, has described the sensa- 

 tions I experienced in a sentence or two, "It is not 

 like the voice of any single singer nor like the voices 

 of a trained choir," he wrote, "It is more the speech, 

 resolved into musical sound, of a vast crowd half per- 

 haps rather than wholly human, whose accents vary from 

 the highest joyousness to the deepest melancholy, from 

 notes of solemn warning to cries of terrifying denuncia- 

 tion and all that of course with an infinity of half and 

 quarter shades of expression." 



Probably the St. Cuthbert bells were larger than those 

 he heard, and perhaps I was closer to them — I was in 

 fact in the belfry with them — as I found no joyous 



