Lessons were over at twelve o'clock; by one o'clock Taffy had to be home for dinner.

Loneliness filled the afternoons, but the child peopled them with extravagant fancies.

He and George were crusaders sworn to defend the Holy Sepulchre, and bound by an oath of brotherhood, though George was a Red Cross Knight and he a plain squire; and after the most surprising adventures Taffy received the barbed and poisoned arrow intended for his master, and died most impressively, with George and Honoria, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and most of the characters from "Ivanhoe," sobbing round his bed.

There was a Blondel variant too, with George imprisoned in a high tower; and a monstrous conglomerate tale in which most of the heroes of history and romance played second fiddle to George, whose pre-eminence, though occasionally challenged by Achilles, Sir Lancelot, or the Black Prince, was regularly vindicated by Taffy's timely help.
This tale, with endless variations, actually lasted him for two good years.

The scene of it never lay among the towans, but round about his old home or the well-remembered meadow at Tewkesbury.