cksmith had set up his forge. He was too poor to
live in a proper house, and no one asked any rent for the rooms in the
ruin, because all the lords of the castle were dead and gone this many a
year. So there John blew his bellows and hammered his iron and did all
the work which came his way. This was not much, because most of the
trade went to the mayor of the town, who was also a blacksmith in quite
a large way of business, and had his huge forge facing the square of the
town, and had twelve apprentices, all hammering like a nest of
woodpeckers, and twelve journeymen to order the apprentices about, and a
patent forge and a self-acting hammer and electric bellows, and all
things handsome about him. So of course the townspeople, whenever they
wanted a horse shod or a shaft mended, went to the mayor. John the
blacksmith struggled on as best he could, with a few odd jobs from
travelers and strangers who did not know what a superior forge the
mayor's was. The two rooms were warm and weather-tight, but not very
large; so the blacksmith got into the way of keeping his old iron, his
odds and ends, his fagots, and his twopence worth of coal in the great
dungeon down under the castle. It was a very fine dungeon indeed, with a
handsome vaulted roof and big iron rings whose staples were built into
the wall, very strong and convenient for tying captives to, and at one
end was a broken flight of wide steps leading down no one knew where.
Even the lords of the castle in the good old times had never known where
those steps led to, but every now and then they would kick a prisoner
down the steps in their lighthearted, hopeful way, and sure enough, the
prisoners never came back. The blacksmith had never dared to go beyond
the seventh step, and no more have I--so I know no more than he did what
was at the bottom of those stairs.

John the blacksmith had a wife and a little baby. When his wife was not
doing the housework she used to nurse the baby and cry, remembering the
happy days when she lived with her father, who kept seventeen cows and
lived quite in the country, and when John used to come courting her in
the summer evenings, as smart as smart, with a posy in his buttonhole.
And now John's hair was getting gray, and there was hardly ever enough
to eat.

As for the baby, it cried a good deal at odd times; but at night, when
its mother had settled down to sleep, it would always begin to cry,
quite as a matter of course, so that she h