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