up to where a great pike of nearly three feet
long lay motionless, close to a patch of weed.

"Must be asleep," thought Roy, "or not hungry, and they all know it,
because he would soon snap up half a dozen of them."

Then, as he lay lazily watching the fish in the drowsy sunshine which
had warmed the stones, the political troubles of the nation and the
great cloud of war, with its lightnings, destruction, and death, were
unseen. He was surrounded by peace in the happiest days of boyhood, and
trouble seemed as if it could not exist. But the trumpet-blast had rung
out the call to arms, and men were flocking to that standard and to
this, and the flash and thunder of guns had begun.

But not there down to that sleepy, retired part of Devon. There was the
castle built for defence, and existing now as Sir Granby Royland's happy
country home, surrounded by its great estate with many tenants, while
its heir was stretched out there in the sunshine upon his chest, kicking
up his heels, and thinking at that moment that it would not be a bad
amusement to bring up a very long line with a plummet at the end, to
bait it, and then swing it to and fro till he could drop it right out
where the great pike lay, ten or a dozen feet from the drawbridge.

"I will some day," said the boy, half aloud; "but it's too much trouble
now."

He swung himself round and lay there, looking back over the top of the
spacious building, on whose roof he was, right across the now floral old
court-yard, and between the two angle towers, to the wide-spreading
acres of the farms and woodlands which formed his father's estate.

The jackdaws flew about, and began to settle at the corners as he lay so
still and languidly said to himself--

"Need to lie still; it wouldn't do to slip over backward. I shouldn't
even go into the moat, for I should come down on those stones."

"Stupid to be in dangerous places," he said to himself directly after,
and, rolling over, he let himself down upon the broad seat-like place,
where he could lie and watch the prospect just as well.

"Rather stupid of me not to come up here oftener," he thought. "It's a
capital place. I will ask father to let me have all this old empty
tower to myself. What's that? A fight?"

For there was a sudden rush upward of jackdaws from where they had
blackened the farthest corner tower to the left, and, looking in that
direction as he lay, he saw the reason of the sudden whirr of wings an