“Sir Fly hangs dead on the window-pane;
The frost doth wind his shroud;
Through the halls of his little summer house
The north wind cries aloud.
We will bury his bones in the mouldy wall,
And mourn for the noble slain:
A southerly wind and a sunny sky—
Buzz! up he comes again!
Oh, Master Fly!”
Nick looked up from the music-rack and shivered. He had forgotten the fire in studying his song, and the blackened ends of the burnt-out logs lay smouldering on the hearth. The draught, too, whistled shrilly under the door, in spite of the rushes that he had piled along the crack.
The fog had been gone for a week. It was snapping cold; and through the peep-holes he had thawed upon the window-pane with his breath, he could see the hoar-frost lying in the shadow of the wall in the court below.
How forlorn the green old dial looked out there alone in the cold, with the winter dust whirling around it in little eddies upon the wind! The dial was fringed with icicles, like an old man’s beard; and even the creeping shadow on its face, which told mid-afternoon, seemed frozen where it fell.
Mid-afternoon already, and he so much to do! Nick pulled his cloak about him, and turned to his song again:
“Sir Fly hangs dead on the window-pane;
The frost doth wind his shroud—”
But there he stopped; for the boys were singing in the great hall below, and the whole house rang with the sound of the roaring chorus:
“Down-a-down, hey, down-a-down,
Hey derry derry down-a-down!”
Nick put his fingers in his ears, and began all over again:
“Sir Fly hangs dead on the window-pane;
The frost doth wind his shroud;
Through the halls of his little summer house
The north wind cries aloud.”