once a moat full of water.
The water from the Thames ran into it and filled it, and it formed a
strong barrier of defence for the Tower, and attacking forces would have
found it a difficult matter to swim across that water with the archers
and soldiers shooting down from the walls above, with flights of arrows
as thick as flights of pigeons. And, of course, the enemies would never
have been allowed to put a boat on the water, for the archers would have
shot them while they were doing it. In old times the kings who lived
here must have felt very safe with their huge thick stone walls and the
great rolling stream of gray water all round. The windows were made very
small, so that arrows could not get into them easily to wound the people
inside the rooms, and the staircases were of stone, very narrow, and
they wound round and round up into one of the towers. They were made so
because then, if ever the enemies did manage to get inside the Tower and
tramped upstairs, they would find that only one, or perhaps two, of them
could get up the steps together to fight, and the men who were guarding
the tower could keep them back for a long time. As I said also, the
gardens are inside the Tower, so the people who lived there could walk
safely in them surrounded by the great gloomy high stone walls.

[Illustration: ST. MARY-LE-STRAND AND BUSH HOUSE.]

Oh, how many stories that Tower has to tell! Every stone of it must have
heard something interesting. But saddest of all must have been the
groans and cries of sorrowful prisoners, for besides being the King's
palace, as I have told you, it was also a prison. That seems very odd to
us now. Fancy if we made part of Buckingham Palace, where the King
lives, into a gaol! But in old times palaces and prisons were often in
one building, partly because it was necessary for both to be very strong
and to resist force, and it was not easy to build two strong buildings
in one place, so they made one do for both. When William the Conqueror
died he had not finished his building, and William Rufus, his son, went
on with it. Rufus finished the square building in the middle, which has
four little corner towers, and this is called the White Tower, not that
it is white at all, though it may have been when first built. Now it has
been blackened by many centuries of smoke. It was not until the reign of
Richard Coeur de Lion that the moat was made, and by that time the Tower
had grown very much, and was a st