The Ship of Stars | Page 3

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 have 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 front of the Mayoralty, a tall
stuccoed building where the public balls were given, and the judges had
their lodgings in assize time, and the Colonel his quarters during the
militia training.
Fine shows passed under Taffy's window. Twice a year came the
judges, with the sheriff in uniform and his chaplain, and his coach, and
his coachman and lackeys in powder and plush and silk stockings,
white or flesh-coloured; and the barristers with their wigs, and the
javelin men and silver trumpets. Every spring, too, the Royal Rangers
Militia came up for training. Suddenly one morning, in the height of the
bird-nesting season, the street would swarm with countrymen tramping
up to the barracks on the hill, and back, with bundles of clothes and
unblackened boots dangling. For the next six weeks the town would be
full of bugle calls, and brazen music, and companies marching and
parading in suits of invisible green, and clanking officers in black, with
little round forage caps, and silver badges on their side-belts; and,
towards evening, with men lounging and smoking, or washing
themselves in public before the doors of their billets.
Usually too, Whitsun Fair fell at the height of the militia training; and
then for two days booths and caravans, sweet-standings and
shooting-galleries lined the main street, and Taffy went out with a
shilling in his pocket to enjoy himself. But the bigger shows--the
menagerie, the marionettes, and the travelling Theatre Royal--were
pitched on Mount Folly,