Then they sheltered a smooth-spoken Italian called Giuseppe, who nearly got them into terrible trouble. He not only never paid a penny, but barely escaped the officers of the law, who asked a great many questions about him and how they came to harbor him. After that they made it a rule not to take any one in unless he was recommended by some one they knew. It was worse to go to prison than to be hungry. One day, when Gilles had just been paid for some work done for Master Nicholas Gay, the rich merchant, a slender, dark-eyed youth with a workman's pack on his shoulder came and asked for a room. Hardly had Joan called her mother when the stranger reeled and fell unconscious on the floor of the shop. He did not know where he was or who he was for days. They remembered Giuseppe and were dubious, but they kept him and tended him until he was able to talk. His tools and his hands showed him to be a wood-carver, and his dress was foreign. His illness was something like what used to be called ship-fever, due to the hard conditions of long voyages, in wooden ships not too clean. When their guest was able to talk he told them that he was Quentin, a wood-carver of Peronne. He had met Matteo in Messina and thus heard of this lodging. He had come to London to work at the oaken stalls of the Bishop of Ely's private chapel in Holborn. These stalls, or choir-seats, in a Gothic church were designed to suit the stately high-arched building. Their straight tall backs were carved in wood, and the arm-rests ended in an ornament called a finial. Often no two stalls were alike, and yet the different designs were shaped to fit the general style, so that the effect was uniform. The carving of one pair of arms might be couchant lions; on the next, leopards; on the next, hounds, and so on. The seats were usually hinged and could be raised when not in use. The under side of the seat, which then formed part of all this elaborate show of decoration, was most often carved with grotesque little squat figures of any sort that occurred to the artist. Here Noah stuck his head out of a nutshell Ark; there a woman belabored her husband for breaking a jug; on the next stall might be three solemn monkeys making butter in a churn. Quentin's fancy was apt to run to little wood-goblins, mermaids, crowned lizards, fauns, and flying ships. He came from a country where the forests are full of fairy-tales. Joan would be very sorry to have Quentin go away. She was thinking of this as she sat in the twilight nursing her wooden poppet. When he came in at last he had his tools with him, and a piece of fine hard wood about two feet long. Seating himself on a bench he lit the betty lamp on the wall, and laying out his knives and gouges he began to carve a face on the wood.