by one o’clock Taffy had to be home for dinner.  Loneliness filled the afternoons, but the child peopled them with extravagant fancies.  He and George were crusaders sworn to defend the Holy Sepulchre, and bound by an oath of brotherhood, though George was a Red Cross Knight and he a plain squire; and after the most surprising adventures Taffy received the barbed and poisoned arrow intended for his master, and died most impressively, with George and Honoria, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and most of the characters from “Ivanhoe,” sobbing round his bed.  There was a Blondel variant too, with George imprisoned in a high tower; and a monstrous conglomerate tale in which most of the heroes of history and romance played second fiddle to George, whose pre-eminence, though occasionally challenged by Achilles, Sir Lancelot, or the Black Prince, was regularly vindicated by Taffy’s timely help.

This tale, with endless variations, actually lasted him for two good years.  The scene of it never lay among the towans, but round about his old home or the well-remembered meadow at Tewkesbury.  That was his plain of Troy, his Field of Cressy, his lists of Ashby de la Zouche.  The high road at the back of the towans crossed a stream, by a ford and a footbridge; and the travelling postman, if he had any letters for the Parsonage, would stop by the footbridge and blow a horn.  He little guessed what challenges it sounded to the small boy who came running for the post.

The postman came by, as a rule, at two o’clock or thereabouts.  One afternoon in early spring Mr. Raymond happened to be starting for a walk when the horn was blown, and he and Taffy went to meet the post together.  There were three or four letters which the Vicar opened; and one for Humility, which he put in his pocket.  In the midst of his reading, he looked up, smiled over his spectacles, and said: 

“Oxford has won the boat-race.”

Taffy had been deep in the Fifth Aeneid for some weeks, and boat-racing ran much in his mind.

“Who is Oxford?” he asked.

Mr. Raymond took off his spectacles and wiped them.  It came on him suddenly that this child, whom he loved, was shut out from many of his dearest thoughts.

“Oxford is a city,” he answered; and added, “the most beautiful city in the world.”

“Shall I ever go there?” Taffy asked.

Mr. Raymond walked off without seeming to hear the question.  But that evening after supper he told the most wonderful tales of Oxford, while Taffy listened and hoped his mother would forget his bedtime; and Humility listened too, bending over her guipure.  The love with which he looked back to Oxford was the second passion of Samuel Raymond’s life; and Humility was proud of it, not jealous at all.  He forgot all the struggle, all the slights, all the grip of poverty.  To him those years had become an heroic age, and men Homeric men.  And so he made them appear to Taffy, to whom it was wonderful that his father should have moved among such giants.