had brought out a basket and cushion, and sat sewing, while Taffy played about and watched the haymakers at their work.  Behind them, within the great church, the organ was sounding; but by-and-by it stopped, and a door opened in the abbey wall, and his father came across the meadow toward them with his surplice on his arm.  And then Humility unpacked the basket and produced a kettle, a spirit-lamp, and a host of things good to eat.  The boy thought the whole adventure splendid.  When tea was done, he sprang up with one of those absurd notions which come into children’s heads: 

“Now let’s feed the poultry,” he cried, and flung his last scrap of bun three feet in air toward the gilt weather-cock on the abbey tower.  While they laughed, “Father, how tall is the tower?” he demanded.

“A hundred and thirty-two feet, my boy, from ground to battlements.”

“What are battlements?”

He was told.

“But people don’t fight here,” he objected.

Then his father told of a battle fought in the very meadow in which they were sitting; of soldiers at bay with their backs to the abbey wall; of crowds that ran screaming into the church; of others chased down Mill Street and drowned; of others killed by the Town Cross; and how—­people said in the upper room of a house still standing in the High Street—­a boy prince had been stabbed.

Humility laid a hand on his arm.

“He’ll be dreaming of all this.  Tell him it was a long time ago, and that these things don’t happen now.”

But her husband was looking up at the tower.

“See it now with the light upon it!” he went on.  “And it has seen it all.  Eight hundred years of heaven’s storms and man’s madness, and still foursquare and as beautiful now as when the old masons took down their scaffolding.  When I was a boy—­”

He broke off suddenly.  “Lord, make men as towers,” he added quietly after a while, and nobody spoke for many minutes.

To Taffy this had seemed a very queer saying; about as queer as that other one about “men as trees walking.”  Somehow—­he could not say why—­he had never asked any questions about it.  But many times he had perched himself on a flat tombstone under the church tower at home, and tilted his head back and stared up at the courses and pinnacles, wondering what his father could have meant, and how a man could possibly be like a tower.  It ended in this—­that whenever he dreamed about his father, these two towers, or a tower which was more or less a combination of both, would get mixed up with the dream as well.

The gate-house contained a sitting-room and three bedrooms (one hardly bigger than a box-cupboard); but a building adjoined it which had been the old Franciscans’ refectory, though now it was divided by common planking into two floors, the lower serving for a feoffee office, while the upper was supposed to be a muniment-room, in charge of the feoffees’ clerk.  The clerk used it for drying his garden-seeds and onions, and spread his hoarding apples to ripen on the floor.  So when Taffy grew to need a room of his own, and his father’s books to cumber the very stairs of the gate-house, the money which Humility and her mother made by their lace-work, and which arrived always by post, came very handy for the rent which the clerk asked for his upper chamber.