voice the boy had!
Like a golden horn blowing in the fresh of a morning breeze. It made
Nick tingle, he could not tell why. He and Colley often sang together,
and their voices made a quivering in the air like the ringing of a bell.
And often, while they sang, the viols standing in the corner of the room
would sound aloud a deep, soft note in harmony with them, although
nobody had touched the strings; so that the others cried out that the
instruments were bewitched, and would not let the boys sing any more.
Colley Warren was Nick's best friend--a dark-eyed, quiet lad, as gentle
as a girl, and with a mouth like a girl's mouth, for which the others
sometimes mocked him, though they loved him none the less.

It was not because his voice was loud that it could be so distinctly
heard; but it was nothing like the rest, and came through all the others
like sunshine through a mist. Nick pulled the stool up closer, and sat
down in the chimney-corner, humming a second to the tune, and blowing
little glory-holes in the embers with the bellows. He liked the smell
of a wood fire, and liked to toast his toes. He was a trifle drowsy,
too, now that he was warm again to the marrow of his bones; perhaps he
dozed a little.

But suddenly he came to himself again with a sense of a great stillness
fallen over everything--no singing in the room below, and silence
everywhere but in the court, where there was a trampling as of horses
standing at the gate. And while he was still lazily wondering, a great
cheer broke out in the room below, and there was a stamping of feet like
cattle galloping over a bridge; and then, all at once, the door opened
into the hallway at the foot of the stair, and the sound burst out as
fire bursts from the cock-loft window of a burning barn, and through the
noise and over it Colley Warren's voice calling him by name: "Skylark!
Nick Skylark! Ho there, Nick! where art thou?"

He sprang to the door and kicked the rushes away. All the hall was full
of voices, laughing, shouting, singing, and cheering. There were
footsteps coming up the stair. "What there, Skylark! Ho, boy! Nick,
where art thou?" he could hear Colley calling above them all. Out he
popped his nose: "Here I am, Colley--what's to do? _Whatever in the
world!_" and he ducked his head like a mandarin; for whizz--flap! two
books came whirling up the stair and thumped against the panel by
his ears.

"The news--the news, Nick! Have ye heard the news?" the lads