rstand a little bit. It was because of
Harriet and Constantia Caw--especially Harriet. It is an eternal
wonder how women misunderstand each other--the best, the kindest, and
especially the prettiest of them.

I would gladly have gone with her, but, of course, that would have been
too marked. Besides, I dared not face my mother without my father.
There was a little fountain made of the mouths of lions on the terrace,
which spouted out thin streams of water into a large oyster shell--the
kind they call _pecten_, I think, only the round part as big as a
horseshoe. And once Elsie was away with Mr. Bailiff Ball, I got father
to wash his face and hands there, which were black and terrible with
matted hair and hardened blood. So that my mother, for all her
outcries, did not really see him at his worst, or anything like it.

The fire mounted always, but somehow in the light of day it did not
seem real. The faces of all the folk as we returned from the water,
were directed to the tower which was called Hobby's Folly. The gabled,
crow-stepped mansion of the Moat had nothing very ancient about
it--that is, to the common view. You had to know the older secrets of
the monks for that. But at the angle overlooking the pond, Mr. Stennis
had caused to be built a square tower in the old Robert the Bruce
donjon fashion, each chamber opening out of the other. These
communicated by ladders, which could be drawn up and all access
prevented. At least that was the tale which the masons who were at the
building brought back to Breckonside. The tower was square on the top
and had low battlements, save at one corner where there was a kind of
pepper-pot cupola in which--so they said--Hobby Stennis used to sit and
count his gold.

At first I could not make out what it was that the folk were craning
their necks upward to look at. Evidently it was on the far side, that
nearest the small lake, and, of course, invisible from the court out of
which my father and I were coming.

But we followed the movement of the people, and there on the utmost
pinnacle of the battlements, that outer corner which was higher than
the rest and shaped like a miniature dome, his long legs twined about
the broken stalk of the weathercock, and his melodeon in his hands, sat
Mad Jeremy! Of the gilt weathercock itself nothing remained save the
butt. With a single clutch of his great hairy hand, Jeremy had rooted
the uneasy fowl out of its socket and hurled it