bury, his father's old home; and he
recalled quite clearly the close of a warm afternoon which he and his
mother had spent there in a green meadow beyond the abbey church.
She had brought out a basket and cushion, and sat sewing, while Taffy
played about and watched the haymakers at their work. Behind them,
within the great church, the organ was sounding; but by-and-by it
stopped, and a door opened in the abbey wall, and his father came
across the meadow toward them with his surplice on his arm. And then
Humility unpacked the basket and produced a kettle, a spirit-lamp,
and a host of things good to eat. The boy thought the whole
adventure splendid. When tea was done, he sprang up with one of
those absurd notions which come into children's heads:

"Now let's feed the poultry," he cried, and flung his last scrap of
bun three feet in air toward the gilt weather-cock on the abbey
tower. While they laughed, "Father, how tall is the tower?" he
demanded.

"A hundred and thirty-two feet, my boy, from ground to battlements."

"What are battlements?"

He was told.

"But people don't fight here," he objected.

Then his father told of a battle fought in the very meadow in which
they were sitting; of soldiers at bay with their backs to the abbey
wall; of crowds that ran screaming into the church; of others chased
down Mill Street and drowned; of others killed by the Town Cross; and
how--people said in the upper room of a house still standing in the
High Street--a boy prince had been stabbed.

Humility laid a hand on his arm.

"He'll be dreaming of all this. Tell him it was a long time ago, and
that these things don't happen now."

But her husband was looking up at the tower.

"See it now with the light upon it!" he went on. "And it has seen it
all. Eight hundred years of heaven's storms and man's madness, and
still foursquare and as beautiful now as when the old masons took
down their scaffolding. When I was a boy--"

He broke off suddenly. "Lord, make men as towers," he added quietly
after a while, and nobody spoke for many minutes.

To Taffy this had seemed a very queer saying; about as queer as that
other one about "men as trees walking." Somehow--he could not say
why--he had never asked any questions about it. But many times he
had perched himself on a flat tombstone under the church tower at
home, and tilted his head back and stared up at the courses and
pinnacles, wondering what his father could hav