[Illustration: ST. MARY-LE-STRAND AND BUSH HOUSE.]
Oh, how many stories that Tower has to tell! Every stone of it must have heard something interesting. But saddest of all must have been the groans and cries of sorrowful prisoners, for besides being the King's palace, as I have told you, it was also a prison. That seems very odd to us now. Fancy if we made part of Buckingham Palace, where the King lives, into a gaol! But in old times palaces and prisons were often in one building, partly because it was necessary for both to be very strong and to resist force, and it was not easy to build two strong buildings in one place, so they made one do for both. When William the Conqueror died he had not finished his building, and William Rufus, his son, went on with it. Rufus finished the square building in the middle, which has four little corner towers, and this is called the White Tower, not that it is white at all, though it may have been when first built. Now it has been blackened by many centuries of smoke. It was not until the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion that the moat was made, and by that time the Tower had grown very much, and was a strong place. John, Richard's brother, who tried to get the throne for himself while Richard was away fighting in the Holy Land, knew that the stronger he could make the Tower the better, for if he could hold it he would be King in London, and no one could seize him and punish him. We shall hear something more about John later. The moat was made when Richard was away in the Holy Land.
When we draw near we see the White Tower standing up above all the rest. To cross the moat we have to go over a bridge, once a drawbridge--that is, a bridge which could be drawn up and let down again as the people in the Tower liked.
Close by the drawbridge was, until just before Queen Victoria's reign, a place where lions and tigers and all sorts of wild animals lived. It seems curious they should have been kept there, where they could not have had any room to wander about, and when they were moved to the Zoological Gardens it must have been much better for them. The animals were here through the reigns of all the kings and queens of England, from Henry I. to Queen Victoria. If we go to the front of the Tower, which faces the river, we shall see a fine sight. There is the splendid Tower Bridge that we read of before; there is the gray, glittering river; and there are many ships and barges floating up and down on the water.