When Barnaby is not to be found after his day's work for love nor money, you are safe to run him to earth in the gatehouse room. A Sindbad's valley it is to him, a Hassan's cave, with all its treasures of crossbows and battle-axes, and catapult relics; its bits of chain-armour, its battered helmets, stags' antlers, and hunting-horns, for all and each of which Adam had his story to tell, as vividly as if he had been honoured by the personal acquaintance of Joan of Arc and William Rufus, or gone a buck-hunting in Hainault Forest with the merry monks of Waltham or bluff King Hal. What gruesome tales too, Master Lockit, sitting of bitter winter nights in his warm ingle neuk. could tell you between the whiffs of his pipe, about yonder spiral staircase, "There, just behind you," which goes winding up past the nail-studded iron clamped door, shutting in the old wing's upper storey. Ever so high, aloft to the tower roof, with the spiked vane atop of its tall twisted chimney. "But he was speakin' mainly," he was, Adam would say, "of where it went round an' round, an' down an' down to what was just wine and wood cellars now, but 'twas no such honest end as that they were scooped out for hunnerds and hunnerds, if so be 'twarn't thousands o' years agone. And Master Rumbold might say what he pleased, an' deny it you as he liked, 'twere just for all the world a honeycomb o' cells an' passages, openin' right an' left into dungeons, till you come out by the weir, over against the ruins o' Nether Hall." "Go on! go on!" Barnaby would gasp, writhing in ecstasy at the recital. "Slidikins! I'm all goose-flesh from top to toe! Master Lockit, go on!" [Sidenote: Master Lockit's word pictures.] "More idiot you," Adam would rejoin, puffing away with immeasurable but secret content in the effect produced by his word picture of their hidden surroundings. "What is it to the likes of us? An't such things all done with now? I'm speakin', I am, of the good old times when royal kings an' queens theirselves wasn't safe on their gold thrones, for blows in the dark." "Happen it might come again," Barnaby would murmur, staring with hopeful rounded eyes into the blazing logs; but when the old belfry clock overhead boomed its warning to bed, Master Diggles stumbling half blind with terror to his sleeping-room in the gabled roof, was a sight not easily to be forgotten.