One night he asked carelessly, “What do you want with the clock?  Lying here you don’t need to know the time; and its ticking must keep you awake.”

“So it does, child; but bless you, I like it.”

“Like being kept awake?”

“Dear, yes!  I have enough of rest and quiet up here.  You mind the litany I used to say over to you?—­Parson Kempthorne taught it to us girls when I was in service with him; ’twas made up, he said, by another old Devonshire parson, years and years ago—­”

“’When I lie within my bed
Sick in heart and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me! 
When the house do sigh and weep—­’”

“That’s it.  You wouldn’t think how quiet it is up here all day.  But at night, when you’re in bed and sleeping, all the house begins to talk; little creakings of furniture, you know, and the wind in the chimney and sometimes the rain in the gutter, running—­it’s all talk to me.  Mostly it’s quite sociable, too; but sometimes, in rainy weather, the tune changes and then it’s like some poor soul in bed and sobbing to itself.  That’s when the verse comes in:” 

“’When the house do sigh and weep
And the world is drowned in sleep,
Yet my eyes the watch do keep,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!’”

“And then the clock’s ticking is a wonderful comfort. Tick-tack, tick-tack! and I think of you stretched asleep and happy and growing up to be a man, and the minutes running and trickling away to my deliverance—­”

“Granny!”

“My dear, I’m as well off as most; but that isn’t saying I shan’t be glad to go and take the pain in my joints to a better land.  Before we came here, in militia-time, I used to lie and listen for the buglers, but now I’ve only the clock.  No more bugles for me, I reckon, till I hear them blown across Jordan.”

Taffy remembered how he too had lain and listened to the bugles; and with that he saw his childhood, as it were a small round globe set within a far larger one and wrapped around with other folks’ thoughts.  He kissed his grandmother and went away wondering; and as he lay down that night it still seemed wonderful to him that she should have heard those bugles, and more wonderful, that night after night for years she should have been thinking of him while he slept, and he never have guessed it.

One morning, some three weeks later, he and his father were putting on their oil-skins before starting to work—­for it had been blowing hard through the night and the gale was breaking up in floods of rain—­when they heard a voice hallooing in the distance.  Humility heard it too and turned swiftly to Taffy.  “Run upstairs, dear.  I expect it’s someone sent from Tresedder farm; and if so, he’ll want to see your father alone.”

Mr. Raymond frowned.  “No,” he said; “the time is past for that.”

A fist hammered on the door.  Mr. Raymond threw it open.