40 MASTER SKYLARK

he, as they came to a shady little wood with a clear,
mossy-bottomed spring running down into a green meadow
with a mild noise, murmuring among the stones. “Come
along, Nicholas; we ’ll eat it under the trees.”

He had a small flask of wine, but Nick drank no wine,
and went down to the spring instead. There was a wild
bird singing in a bush there, and as he trotted down the
slope it hushed its wandering tune. Nick took the sound
up softly, and stood by the wet stones a little while,
imitating the bird’s trilling note, and laughing to hear it
answer timidly, as if it took him for some great new bird
without wings. Cocking its shy head and watching him
shrewdly with its beady eye, it sat, almost persuaded that
it was only size which made them different, until Nick
clapped his cap upon his head and strolled back, singing
as he went.

It was only the thread of an old-fashioned madrigal
which he had often heard his mother sing, with quaint
words long since gone out of style and hardly to be un-
derstood, and between the staves a warbling, wordless re-
frain which he had learned out on the hills and in the
fields, picked up from a bird’s glad-throated morning-
song.

He had always sung the plain-tunes in church without
taking any particular thought about it; and he sang
easily, with a clear young voice which had a full, flute-
like note in it like the high, sweet song of a thrush singing
in deep woods.

Gaston Carew, the master-player, was sitting with his