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 paste jewels.

And, truth, it was no easy thing to tell them from the real affair, or to guess the made from the maiden, so slender and so graceful were they all, with their ruffs and their muffs and their feathered fans, and all the airs and mincing graces of the daintiest young miss.

But old Nat Gyles would never have Nick Attwood play the girl.  “The lad is good enough for me just as he is,” said he; and that was all there was of it.

CHAPTER XXV

THE WANING OF THE YEAR

In September the Lord Admiral’s company made a tour of the Midlands during the great English fairing-time; but Carew did not go with them.  For, though still by name master-player with Henslowe and Alleyn, his business with them had come to be but little more than pocketing his share of the profits; and for the rest, nothing but to take Nick daily to and from St. Paul’s, and to draw his wages week by week.

Of those wages Nick saw never a penny:  Carew took good care of that.  Yet he gave him everything that any boy could need, and bought him whatever he fancied the instant he so much as expressed a wish for it:  which, in truth, was not much; for Nick had lived in only a country town, and knew not many things to want.