Rufus fall from a poisoned arrow shot by Robin Hood; but thanks to
sweet Queen Eleanor, who sucked the poison from his wound, I knew he
lived. Oliver Cromwell, having killed King Charles, married his
widow, and was in turn stabbed by Hamlet. Ulysses, in the Argo, it
was fixed upon my mind, had discovered America. Romulus and Remus had
slain the wolf and rescued Little Red Riding Hood. Good King Arthur,
for letting the cakes burn, had been murdered by his uncle in the
Tower of London. Prometheus, bound to the Rock, had been saved by
good St. George. Paris had given the apple to William Tell. What
matter! the information was there. It needed rearranging, that was
all.

Sometimes, of an afternoon, we would climb the steep winding pathway
through the woods, past awful precipices, spirit-haunted, by grassy
swards where fairies danced o' nights, by briar and bracken sheltered
Caves where fearsome creatures lurked, till high above the creeping
sea we would reach the open plateau where rose old Jacob's ruined
tower. "Jacob's Folly" it was more often called about the country
side, and by some "The Devil's Tower;" for legend had it that there
old Jacob and his master, the Devil, had often met in windy weather to
wave false wrecking lights to troubled ships. Who "old Jacob" was, I
never, that I can remember, learned, nor how nor why he built the
Tower. Certain only it is his memory was unpopular, and the fisher
folk would swear that still on stormy nights strange lights would
gleam and flash from the ivy-curtained windows of his Folly.

But in day time no spot was more inviting, the short moss-grass before
its shattered door, the lichen on its crumbling stones. From its
topmost platform one saw the distant mountains, faint like spectres,
and the silent ships that came and vanished; and about one's feet the