“That,” said Colonel Rush, “is the old stone mill.”
“I don’t think it looks much like a mill,” said Bessie: “it don’t have any things to go round.”
“Probably it had things to go round, as you call them, once upon a time,” said the Colonel.
“I thought it was a tower built by the early settlers to defend themselves from the Indians,” said Harry. “Willie Thorn told me so.”
“Many people think so,” said the Colonel, “and some still believe that it was built by the Danes, hundreds of years ago.”
“Oh!” said Fred, “this is the tower Longfellow wrote about in his ‘Skeleton in Armor,’ isn’t it, sir?”
“The very same,” said the Colonel; “but, I believe, Fred, that it has been pretty well proved, from old papers, that it had no such romantic beginning, but was really and truly a windmill.”
“Tell me about the skeleton, Fred,” said Maggie.
So Fred told how a skeleton in armor, having been found in a place called Fall River, some miles from Newport, the poet, Longfellow, had written a ballad about it; telling how a viking, or Norwegian sailor of the olden time, had fallen in love with the daughter of a prince, who refused to give his child to the roving sailor; but they had run away together, and crossing the sea had come to this spot, where the viking had built this tower for his wife to live in.
“Here for my lady’s bower