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 understood, and between the staves a warbling, wordless refrain 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 back against an oak, placidly munching the last of the cheese, when Nick began to sing.  He started, straightening up as if some one had called him suddenly out of a sound sleep, and, turning his head, listened eagerly.

Nick mocked the wild bird, called again with a mellow, warbling trill, and then struck up the quaint old madrigal with the bird’s song running through it.  Carew leaped to his feet, with a flash in his dark eyes.  “My soul! my soul!” he exclaimed in an excited undertone.  “It is not—­nay, it cannot be—­why, ’tis—­it is the boy!  Upon my heart, he hath a skylark prisoned in his throat! Well sung, well sung, Master Skylark!" he cried, clapping his hands in real delight, as Nick came singing up the bank.  “Why, lad, I vow I thought thou wert up in the sky somewhere, with wings to thy back!  Where didst thou learn that wonder-song?”

Nick colored up, quite taken aback.  “I do na know, sir,” said he; “mother learned me part, and the rest just came, I think, sir.”

The master-player, his whole face alive and eager, now stared at Nicholas Attwood as fixedly as Nick had stared at him.

It was a hearty little English lad he saw, about eleven years of age, tall, slender, trimly built, and fair.  A gray cloth cap clung to the side of his curly yellow head, and he wore a sleeveless jerkin of dark-blue serge, gray home-spun hose, and heelless shoes of russet leather.  The white sleeves of his linen shirt were open to the elbow, and his arms were lithe and brown.  His eyes were frankly clear and blue, and his red mouth had a trick of smiling that went straight to a body’s heart.

“Why, lad, lad,” cried Carew, breathlessly, “thou hast a very fortune in thy throat!”