eep and thinks
to be of one's dream. And the word was monotonously repeated, in
French.

When I turned round I saw an old man with a horn. He had a white beard
marvellously long, and still went on saying slowly, "Beware, beware."
He had clearly just come from the tower by which he stood, though I
had heard no footfall. Had a man come stealthily upon me at such an
hour and in so lonesome a place I had certainly felt surprised; but I
saw almost at once that he was a spirit, and he seemed with his
uncouth horn and his long white beard and that noiseless step of his
to be so native to that time and place that I spoke to him as one does
to some fellow-traveller who asks you if you mind having the window
up.

I asked him what there was to beware of.

"Of what should a town beware," he said, "but the Saracens?"

"Saracens?" I said.

"Yes, Saracens, Saracens," he answered and brandished his horn.

"And who are you?" I said.

"I, I am the spirit of the tower," he said.

When I asked him how he came by so human an aspect and was so unlike
the material tower beside him he told me that the lives of all the
watchers who had ever held the horn in the tower there had gone to
make the spirit of the tower. "It takes a hundred lives," he said.
"None hold the horn of late and men neglect the tower. When the walls
are in ill repair the Saracens come: it was ever so."

"The Saracens don't come nowadays," I said.

But he was gazing past me watching, and did not seem to heed me.

"They will run down those hills," he said, pointing away to the South,
"out of the woods about nightfall, and I shall blow my horn. The
people will all come up from the town to the tower again; but the
loopholes are in very ill repair."

"We never hear of the Saracens now," I said.

"Hear of the Saracens!" the old spirit said. "Hear of the Saracens!
They slip one evening out of that forest, in the long white robes that
they wear, and I blow my horn. That is the first that anyone ever
hears of the Saracens."

"I mean," I said, "that they never come at all. They cannot come and
men fear other things." For I thought the old spirit might rest if he
knew that the Saracens can never come again. But he said, "There is
nothing in the world to fear but the Saracens. Nothing else matters.
How can men fear other things?"

Then I explained, so that he might have rest, and told him how all
Europe, and in particular France, had terrible engines of war, both on