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From that time I was a frequent visitor to the owls, and for three summers they bred at the same spot in spite of the anxiety they suffered on my account, and I saw and grew familiar with their quaint-looking young, clothed in white down and with long narrow pointed heads more like the heads of aquatic birds than of round-headed flat-faced owls.

So swimming and staring my eyes roamed downward to the great round-headed coved window above the gallery. The railing of the gallery had a sort of wicket in it, by which bathers could emerge one by one on to the bracket- like platform which overhung the pool at that end, for use as a take-off for a high dive.

Under the legless chair, as it were, there are two supports, at the lower end of which and between these supports revolves a heavy, nearly round wheel, with four spokes. Occasionally the wheel is made of one block of wood only, and is ornamented at the sides with numerous round-headed iron nails.

A timber roof, simple as that of a country barn, and of which only the horizontal beams catch the eye, connects an entirely plain outside wall with an interior one, pierced by round-headed openings; in which are inserted pieces of complex tracery, as foreign in conception to the rest of the work as if the Pisan armata had gone up the Rhine instead of to Crete, pillaged South Germany, and cut these pieces of tracery out of the windows of some church in an advanced stage of fantastic design at Nuremberg or Frankfort.

And that is exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the Teutons and the Latins. I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference to any one who felt inclined to break his head.

The White Abbey is a truly Cistercian building, a simple cross with a flat east end, no aisles to the nave, but chapels east of the transepts. It follows the usual law of Transitional buildings. The main constructive arches are pointed; the windows are round-headed in the eastern part, pointed in the western.

It was a robust, round-headed, short-legged creature, about as big as a good-sized cat, and clothed in a thick, greenish-brown fur.

Beyond it, again, is a round-headed tree, looking like a huge Portugal laurel, covered with racemes of purple buds. And what are those at the top of the brow, rising out of the rich green scrub? Verily, again, we are in the Tropics. They are palms, doubtless, some thirty feet high each, with here and there a young one springing up like a gigantic crown of male-fern.

Its west wall contains two round-headed windows with billet moulding, the northern one blocked up; and at the north-west corner is a cluster of cylindrical shafts running up to about the same height as the walls of the aisle. Why they terminated here it is hard to say; they may mark the termination of the original Norman wall.

It is a more completely Norman building than St Etienne, but its simple, semi-circular arches and round-headed windows contrast strangely with the huge pontifical canopy of draped velvet that is suspended above the altar, and very effectually blocks the view of the Norman apse beyond.