All among the furze-bush, round the crystal dewpond,
Feed the silly sheep like a cloud upon the down.
Come safely home to croft, bear fleeces white and soft,
Then we’ll send the wool-wains to fair London Town.
All in the dawnlight, white as a snowdrift
Lies the wool a-waiting the spindle and the wheel.
Sing, wheel, right cheerily, while I pace merrily,—
Knot by knot the thread runs on the busy reel.
All in the sunshine, gay as a garden,
Lie the skeins for weaving, the blue and gold and red.
Fly, shuttle, merrily, in and out cheerily,
Making all the woof bright with a rainbow thread.
All in the noontide, wend we to market,—
Hear the folk a-chaffering like jackdaws up and down.
Master, give ear to me, here’s cloth for you to see,
Fit for a canopy in fair London Town.
All in the twilight sweet with the hearth-smoke,
Homeward we go riding while the vesper bells ring.
Southdown or Highland Scot, Fleming or Huguenot,
Weaving our tapestries we shall serve our King!
XVI
LOOMS IN MINCHEN LANE
HOW CORNELYS BAT, THE FLEMISH WEAVER, BEFRIENDED A BLACK SHEEP AND SAVED HIS WOOL
It was in the early springtime, when lambs are frisking like rabbits upon the tender green grass, and all the land is like a tapestry of blue and white and gold and pink and green. Robert Edrupt, as he rode westward from London on his homeward way, felt that he had never loved his country quite so well as now. He had gone with a flock of English sheep to northern Spain, and come back in the same ship with the Spanish jennets which the captain took in exchange. On one of those graceful half-Arabian horses he was now riding, and on another, a little behind him, rode a swarthy, black-haired and black-eyed youngster in a sheepskin tunic, who looked about him as if all that he saw were strange.
In truth Cimarron, as they called him, was very like a wild sheep from his native Pyrenees, and Edrupt was wondering, with some amusement and a little apprehension, what his grandmother and Barbara would say. The boy had been his servant in a rather dangerous expedition through the mountains, and but for his watchfulness and courage the English wool-merchant might not have come back alive. Edrupt had been awakened between two and three in the morning and told that robbers were on their trail, and then, abandoning their animals, Cimarron had led him over a precipitous cliff and down into the next valley by a road which he and the wild creatures alone had traveled. When the horses were led on shipboard the boy had come with them, and London was no place to leave him after that.