The Ship of Stars

house had once formed part of a large religious building, and the boy's bedroom had a high groined roof, and on the capstone an

Mark, Luke

bed that

rners t

els roun

atch, on

ear my s

iting in the next room, ready to bear away the soul of his grandmother (who was bed-ridden), and that he had Luke for an angel because he was called Theophilus, aft

se near Honiton, in Devon. The farm belonged to an invalid widow named Venning, who let it be managed by her daughter Humility and two paid labourers, while she herself sat by the window in her kitchen parlour, busied incessantly with lace-work of that beautiful kind for which Honiton is famous. He was an unassuming youth; and although in those days servitors were no longer called upon to black the boots of richer undergraduates, the widow and her daughter soon divined that he was lowlier than the others, and his position an awkward one, and were

e since these things ha

past his eig

losing his eyes, he could always see the two women quite plainly; and always he saw them at work, each with a pillow on her lap, and the lace upon it growing, growing, until the pins and bobbins wove a pattern that was a dream, and he

learly the close of a warm afternoon which he and his mother had spent there in a green meadow beyond the abbey church. She had brought out a basket and cushion, and sat sewing, while Taffy played about and watched the haymakers at their work. Behind them, within the great church, the organ was sounding; but by-and-by it stopped, and a door opened i

bun three feet in air toward the gilt weather-cock on the abbey towe

two feet, my boy, from

re batt

as t

n't fight here

e abbey wall; of crowds that ran screaming into the church; of others chased down Mill Street and drowned; of others killed by t

aid a hand

l him it was a long time ago, and t

d was looking

undred years of heaven's storms and man's madness, and still foursquare and as be

as towers," he added quietly after a wh

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

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 roo

house by a narrow doorway pierced in the wall. All this, whilst it was doing, intereste

y, "you will look high

, like you

t this and said: "Je

ed: "Perhaps I'

oom with a vaulted roof and a windo