e meant, and how a man
could possibly be like a tower. It ended in this--that whenever he
dreamed about his father, these two towers, or a tower which was more
or less a combination of both, would get mixed up with the dream as
well.

The gate-house contained a sitting-room and three bedrooms (one
hardly bigger than a box-cupboard); but a building adjoined it which
had been the old Franciscans' refectory, though now it was divided by
common planking into two floors, the lower serving for a feoffee
office, while the upper was supposed to be a muniment-room, in charge
of the feoffees' clerk. The clerk used it for drying his
garden-seeds and onions, and spread his hoarding apples to ripen on
the floor. So when Taffy grew to need a room of his own, and his
father's books to cumber the very stairs of the gate-house, the money
which Humility and her mother made by their lace-work, and which
arrived always by post, came very handy for the rent which the clerk
asked for his upper chamber.

Carpenters appeared and partitioned it off into two rooms,
communicating with the gate-house by a narrow doorway pierced in the
wall. All this, whilst it was doing, interested Taffy mightily; and
he announced his intention of being a carpenter one of these days.

"I hope," said Humility, "you will look higher, and be a preacher of
God's Word, like your father."

His father frowned at this and said: "Jesus Christ was both."

Taffy compromised: "Perhaps I'll make pulpits."

This was how he came to have a bedroom with a vaulted roof and a
window that reached down below the floor.

CHAPTER II.

MUSIC IN THE TOWN SQUARE.

This window looked upon the Town Square, and across it to the
Mayoralty. The square had once been the Franciscans' burial-ground,
and was really no square at all, but a semicircle. The townspeople
called it Mount Folly. The chord of the arc was formed by a large
Assize Hall, with a broad flight of granite steps, and a cannon
planted on either side of the steps. The children used to climb
about these cannons, and Taffy had picked out his first letters from
the words _Sevastopol_ and _Russian Trophy_, painted in white on
their lead-coloured carriages.

Below the Assize Hall an open gravelled space sloped gently down to a
line of iron railings and another flight of granite steps leading
into the main street. The street curved uphill around the base of
this open ground, and came level with it just in fr