He sat up dazed, and rubbed his elbows, then looked around and began to laugh.

He could hear heavy footsteps overhead.  A door opened, and his father’s voice called sternly from the head of the stair:  “What madcap folly art thou up to now?”

“I be up to no folly at all,” said Nick, “but down, sir.  I fell from the stool.  There is no harm done.”

“Then be about thy business,” said Attwood, coming slowly down the stairs.

He was a gaunt man, smelling of leather and untanned hides.  His short iron-gray hair grew low down upon his forehead, and his hooked nose, grim wide mouth, and heavy under jaw gave him a look at once forbidding and severe.  His doublet of serge and his fustian hose were stained with liquor from the vats, and his eyes were heavy with sleep.

The smile faded from Nick’s face.  “Shall I throw the rushes into the street, sir?” “Nay; take them to the muck-hill.  The burgesses ha’ made a great to-do about folk throwing trash into the highways.  Soul and body o’ man!” he growled, “a man must ask if he may breathe.  And good hides going a-begging, too!”

Nick hurried away, for he dreaded his father’s sullen moods.

The swine were squealing in their styes, the cattle bawled about the straw-thatched barns in Chapel lane, and long files of gabbling ducks waddled hurriedly down to the river through the primroses under the hedge.  He could hear the milkmaids calling in the meadows; and when he trundled slowly home the smoke was creeping up in pale-blue threads from the draught-holes in the wall.

The tanner’s house stood a little back from the thoroughfare, in that part of Stratford-on-Avon where the south end of Church street turns from Bull lane toward the river.  It was roughly built of timber and plaster, the black beams showing through the yellow lime in curious squares and triangles.  The roof was of red tiles, and where the spreading elms leaned over it the peaked gable was green with moss.

At the side of the house was a garden of lettuce; beyond the garden a rough wall on which the grass was growing.  Sometimes wild primroses grew on top of this wall, and once a yellow daffodil.  Beyond the wall were other gardens owned by thrifty neighbors, and open lands in common to them all, where foot-paths wandered here and there in a free, haphazard way.

Behind the house was a well and a wood-pile, and along the lane ran a whitewashed paling fence with a little gate, from which the path went up to the door through rows of bright, old-fashioned flowers.

Nick’s mother was getting the breakfast.  She was a gentle woman with a sweet, kind face, and a little air of quiet dignity that made her doubly dear to Nick by contrast with his father’s unkempt ways.  He used to think that, in her worsted gown, with its falling collar of Antwerp linen, and a soft, silken coif upon her fading hair, she was the most beautiful woman in all the world.