l the town like the clean,
sweet smell of the open fields just after a summer rain, no colors like
the bright heart's-ease and none-so-pretty, or the honeysuckle over the
cottage door, and no song ever to be heard among the sooty chimney-pots
like the song of the throstle piping to the daisies on the hill.

But he had little time to dream such dreams, for every day from four to
six o'clock the children's company played and sang in public, at their
own school-hall, or in the courtyard of the Mitre Inn on Bread street
near St. Paul's.

They were the pets of London town, and their playing-place was thronged
day after day. For the bright young faces and sweet, unbroken voices of
the richly costumed lads made a spot in sordid London life like a pot of
posies in a window on a dark street; so that both the high and the low,
the rich and the poor, came in to see them play and dance, to hear them
sing, and to laugh again at the witty things which were written for
them to say.

The songs that were set for Nick to sing were always short, sweet,
simple things that even the dull-eyed, toil-worn folk upon the rough
plank benches in the pit could understand. Many a silver shilling came
clinking down at the heels of the other boys from the galleries of the
inn, where the people of the better classes, wealthy merchants, ladies
and their dashing gallants, watched the children's company; but when
Nick's songs were done the common people down below seemed all gone
daft. They tossed red apples after him, ripe yellow pears, fat purple
plums by handfuls, called him by name and brought him back, and cried
for more and more and more, until the old precentor shook his head
behind the prompters-screen, and waved Nick off with a forbidding frown.
Yet all the while he chuckled to himself until it seemed as if his dry
old ribs would rattle in his sides; and every day, before Nick sang, he
had him up to his little room for a broken egg and a cup of
rosy cordial.

"To clear thy voice and to cheer the cockles of thine heart," said he;
"and to tune that pretty throat of thine _ad gustum Reginae_--which is
to say, 'to the Queen's own taste,'--God bless Her Majesty!"

The other boys were cast for women's parts, for women never acted then;
and a queer sight it was to Nick to see his fellows in great
farthingales of taffeta and starchy cambric that rustled as they
walked, with popinjay blue ribbon in their hair, and flowered stomachers
sparkling with