Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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102 THE MIRACLES OF AJVTICHRIST
San Pasquale’s bells are not much bigger than
those that are used on farms to call the work people
home; and like them, they are hung under the roof
in a little frame, and set in motion by pulling a rope
that hangs down by the church wall.
It is not heavy work to make the bells ring,
but nevertheless they are not so light that they
can swing quite by themselves. Whoever has
seen old Fra Felice from the Franciscan
monastery put his foot in the loop of the rope and tread
up and down to start them going, knows well
enough that the bells cannot begin to ring without
assistance.
But that was just what they were doing that
morning. The rope was fastened to a cleat in the wall,
and there was no one touching it. Nor did any one
sit crouching on the roof to set them going. People
plainly saw how the bells swung backwards and
forwards, and how the tongues hit against the brazen
throats. It could not be explained.
When Donna Micaela awoke, the bells were
already ringing, and she lay quiet for a long time,
and listened, and listened. She had never heard
anything more beautiful. She did not know that it
was a miracle, but she lay and thought how
beautiful it was. She lay and wondered if real bronze bells
could sound like that.
No one will ever know what the metal was that
rang in San Pasquale’s bells that day.
She thought that the bells said to her that now
she was to be glad; now she was to live and love;
now she was to go to meet something great and
beautiful; now she was never again to have regrets
and never be sad,
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