nage it.

"Looks as if everything must be set fast with rust," he thought, and he
was about to turn and descend; but as he reached the corner where the
spiral steps led down, he stood where they also led up to another
chamber in the massive stone-work, and again higher to the leads.

The result was that in his idle mood Roy began to ascend, to find
half-way up, by the slit which gave light, that the jackdaws had been
busy there too, coming in and out by the loop-hole, and building a nest
which was supported upon a scaffolding of sticks which curved up from
the stone step on which it rested, and from that to the splay and sill
by the loop-hole.

"Only an old one," said the boy to himself, and he brought the great
edifice down with a sharp kick or two, thinking that it must be about a
year since any one had come up that way.

"What a lot of the old place seems no use!" he said to himself, as, with
the dry sticks crackling beneath his feet, he climbed up the dark
stairway and entered the next chamber through its low arched door.

"Why, what a jolly private room this would make!" he said to himself;
"only wants a casement in and some furniture. I'll ask father to let me
have it for my play--I mean study; no, I don't--I mean odds and ends
place."

He paused--after glancing out at the beautiful view over the woodland
country dotted with meadow-like pastures in which the ruddy cattle of
the county grazed--by the open fireplace with the arms of the Roylands
cut in stone beneath the narrow shelf, and the sight of this opening,
with the narrow, well-made chimney and some projecting stone blocks from
the fire-back, set him thinking.

"Fight differently now," he said, as he recalled the object of the
furnace before him, and how he had heard or read that it was used on
purpose to melt lead ready for pouring down upon the besiegers who might
have forced their way across the drawbridge to the portcullis. "Fancy
melting lead here to pour down upon men's heads! What wretches we must
have been in the old days."

He altered his mind, though, directly, as he went back to the stairway.

"Perhaps we never did pour any down, for I don't think anybody ever did
attack the castle."

Thinking he might as well go a little higher, he mounted the spiral
instead of descending, the dry elm twigs brought in by the jackdaws
which made the untenanted corners their home crackling again beneath his
feet.

Passing out of the corner turret,