CHAPTER IV. THE OLD RYE HOUSE. When the Rye House was built, or at least its gate-tower wing of which we are now speaking, and which was as old as the time of King Henry the Sixth, probably no dwelling of any importance, with the exception of Nether Hall, a still more ancient baronial structure, stood within miles of it. Strong as rocks were its fortified outer walls; and in many parts its interior walls were three feet thick. This was the case with the old "Debtors' Prison," lying at the older wing's extreme end, and forming the angle connecting it with the new wing, which dated only from the time of Queen Elizabeth. In this debtors' prison Master Rumbold, as we have seen, now stored his malt. The wall separating Maudlin Sweetapple's little sleeping chamber from the more spacious one occupied by Ruth, was of at least equal strength and solidity with the walls of this storing room; but while in the one case the surface showed the bare hewn stone, polished only by the hand of time, panellings carved in many a quaint device, and reaching half-way to the flat oak-timbered ceiling, lined the "Lady's Bower," as time beyond all count, Ruth's room had been called. [Sidenote: Ruth's bower.] Here she held sway undisputed; spending in it hours of her lonely days when her father was absent from home, as of late she noted he so frequently had been. So she sat strumming on the broken and half-stringless virginal, or spelling out the crabbed type of several worm-eaten books, chiefly poems--long winded, wordy things enough. Still she cared for them in a fashion; and one volume, whose title-page set forth that its contents were from the pen of one William Shakespeare, a play-actor, took her mightily. Line after line she would tell you of many of the long speeches and odd sayings it contained; though she kept her studies to herself, for Maudlin had not very much of a turn for book-learning, and Master Rumbold always said, if it had not been for the Bible, and that godly person Mr. Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, child of his should not have been taught to read at all. Then as to writing, he was near never speaking one word more to Madam Lee after one fine day when he made the frightful discovery that she had been teaching the little girl so successfully to make pot-hooks and hangers, that long before Lawrence was out of the alphabet Ruth had been writing on her own responsibility, and in unmistakeable fair round hand: "Fear God. Honour the King." Wroth indeed was Master Rumbold over the "fine surprise" thus prepared for him by instructress and pupil. The knowledge, however, could not be unlearned; and such a penwoman as Ruth remained till the day of her death you might go a hundred miles and not find.