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