Me and Mr. Bell Read Free Page A

MacDougall’s.”
    She frowned into the pot. “I don’t think it was Mr. Bell, Eddie, it must have been somebody else. Mr. Bell wouldn’t be out walking in MacDougall’s field.”
    â€œIt was him! He told me his name, and he shook my hand.”
    â€œHe shook your hand?” My mother smiled. She liked the thought that I had shaken hands with Mr. Bell. She turned her head and stared out the window for just a second, and she looked a little dreamy. Then she scooped the potatoes into a bowl. “You’d better wash up.” She leaned closer and spoke to me as if she were telling me a secret. “Better not tell your father about that, Eddie.”
    I saw the look of confusion on her face. “Okay.”
    At school, no one believed me, and I wished I had never said anything. But I couldn’t help it, and it kind of slipped out. Our teacher, Miss Lawrence, seemed to have two faces: one with which she believed everything you said and one with which she didn’t believe anything you said. When Joey MacDougall said that he and his father saw Mr. Bell out in a boat with another man, smoking cigars and creating a cloud of fog, I let it slip that I had just met Mr. Bell in the field, and that he shook my hand.
    â€œYeah, sure he did,” said Joey. “And was he standing on four legs and chewing his cud?”
    Everybody laughed.
    â€œI did!” I said, and looked toward Miss Lawrence, but her face had suddenly turned from belief to disbelief. After that, I went to MacDougall’s field every day for two weeks but never saw Mr. Bell. The next time I met him was down at the lake, when he snuck up on me.
    I was standing in the water up to my knees. There was no wind and the lake was flat and shiny, like a silver plate. But I knew it wasn’t really flat because the earth is round. That means that everything on the earth is round, even the lake. I had heard that at the ocean you could watch a ship sink below the horizon as it sailed away and that that showed you the roundness of the earth. Well, I wanted to know if I could see any of the roundness of the earth by looking ten miles across Bras d’Or Lake.
    So I rolled up my pants, crouched down in the water and brought my head close to the surface, which was kind of awkward. It would have been easier to walk up to my neck and look straight across the lake, but I didn’t want to get my clothes all wet. There was a small boat in the distance, and I stared at it, trying to see if it was dropping below the horizon. I was pretty sure it was. But the stones were slippery, and I thought I’d better get a stick to hold on to so I wouldn’t fall in. When I turned around, I got a fright. About ten feet behind me, Mr. Bell was crouching the same way I was and was staring out at the lake. He scared the heck out of me.
    He was squinting really hard, trying to see whatever it was I was looking at. He was so curious, he was behaving like one of my friends might behave except that none of my friends was that curious.
    â€œHeavens above! You’ll have to tell me, dear boy,” said Mr. Bell, “what you have been staring at so intensely.”
    I was shy about telling him. “Um … I was trying to see the roundness of the earth on the lake, Sir.”
    Mr. Bell stood right up. “I knew it! I just knew that was it!” He wore a great big smile now. “And pray, tell me, did you see it?”
    I nodded my head. “I think so, Sir.”
    â€œSplendid!”
    Mr. Bell walked into the water and stood beside me. “That boat way out there?”
    â€œYes, Sir.”
    He blocked the sun with his hand and stared. “If only we had some way to measure it.”
    I wondered if he was being serious. He sure sounded serious. He sounded like he really wanted to know.
    â€œI saw in a math book that you can measure distances between far places if you know what the angles are between them, but