ink she's a wicked woman, Nurse?" He gazed at the stout
figure with interest. If he were truly God he would turn her into a
rabbit. This thought amused him, and he began to laugh.

"You naughty boy; now come along, do," said the Jampot, who distrusted
laughter in Jerry.

"I'll ring the bells when I grow up," he said, "and I'll ring them in
the middle of the night, so that everyone will have to go to church when
they don't want to. I'll be able to do what I like when I grow up."

"No, you won't," said Helen. "Father and Mother can't do what they
like."

"Yes they can," said Jeremy.

"No they can't," answered Helen, "or they would."

"So they do," said Jeremy--"silly."

"Silly yourself," said Helen very calmly, because she knew very well
that she was not silly.

"Now, children, stop it, do," said the Jampot.

Jeremy's sense of newly received power reached its climax when they
walked round the Close and reached the back of the Cathedral. I know
that now, both for Jeremy and me, that prospect has dwindled into
its proper grown-up proportions, but how can a man, be he come to
threescore and ten and more, ever forget the size, the splendour, the
stupendous extravagance of that early vision?

Jeremy saw that day the old fragment of castle wall, the green expanse
falling like a sheeted waterfall from the Cathedral heights, the blue
line of river flashing in the evening sun between the bare-boughed
trees, the long spaces of black shadow spreading slowly over the colour,
as though it were all being rolled up and laid away for another day;
the brown frosty path of the Rope Walk, the farther bank climbing into
fields and hedges, ending in the ridge of wood, black against the golden
sky. And all so still! As the children stood there they could catch
nestlings' faint cries, stirrings of dead leaves and twigs, as birds
and beasts moved to their homes; the cooing of the rooks about the black
branches seemed to promise that this world should be for ever tranquil,
for ever cloistered and removed; the sun, red and flaming above the dark
wood, flung white mists hither and thither to veil its departure. The
silence deepened, the last light flamed on the river and died upon the
hill.

"Now, children, come along do," said the Jampot who had been held
in spite of herself, and would pay for it, she knew, in rheumatism
to-morrow. It was then that Jeremy's God-flung sense of power, born
from that moment early in the day when he had