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This open space was just outside the turreted north wall of the city, and was girt by tall elms, and near it was a sheet of water whereon the London boys loved to skate when the frost came. It was the city playground, and the city gallows were placed there before they were removed to Tyburn.

The moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo hill into the valley of the Tiber.

A terrace eighty feet in diameter rises from the bare ground, and in its centre, upon a substructure of stone, towers an iron temple or shrine in the turreted Gothic style, divided into twelve chapels or niches. A noble cluster of idealised military heroism they stand; some in the stubborn attitude of resistance, others in the eager impetuosity of attack, all wonderfully spirited.

The rooks whirled in black clouds round the trees and the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give that country the look of being studded with turreted castles; then they descended a black line upon the fields, with what seemed an unearthly loudness of caw.

In the evenings, by the parlour fire, Edward read aloud to her. He did not, however, read prayers, and she wondered in silence at the change. She felt a great peace in these evenings, with Foxy on the hearthrug at her feet. They neither of them looked either backward or forward, but lived in the moated present, that turreted heaven whose defences so soon fall. On the third morning Reddin came.

But all our interest in a few moments was focussed upon a most imposing ruin, a real Windsor Castle of a rudimentary type, which commanded a hilltop on a table-land on the right, great walls rearing themselves up to the sky, towers defending every corner, a turreted gate-house the entrance, and the whole loop-holed, grim-looking enough.

It is formed in the castellated style, of a handsome octagonal tower, of very white, shelly limestone, with a square turreted stone enclosure, on the top of which is an iron chevaux de frize, and which enclosure is subdivided into separate day-yards for prisoners.

These three huge, turreted fighting craft had their full crews aboard. Not one of the battleship commanders would allow a "jackie" ashore, except on business, through fear that many of the "wilder" ones might find the attractions on shore too alluring, and fail to return in time. With the young midshipmen it was different.

Others come from harems in the turreted cities beyond the Atlas, where blue palm-groves beat all night against the stars and date-caravans journey across the desert from Timbuctoo.

Rather less than half a century before, Daniel Herbert, then a country urchin tending cattle on the hillside where now stood his turreted stone mansion, had decided that some day when he should be rich he would return and buy that hillside and the great reach of flat river-bottom that lay adjacent to it, and there build his home.