Hearing no reply to this outburst, and wondering who it was that could take such language in silence, we hurried forward, and saw, standing beside the well, under the trees, a boy and no one else; a boy of some twelve years of age, dressed in a gorgeous robe of pale yellow silk; a singularly beautiful boy, with great dark eyes and curly dark hair, but a face extremely pallid and stained with tears; a face, in fact, the saddest I had ever seen in a child. He was picking up from the wet ground beside the well handfuls of mud, and spattering his silk robe with it; and as we arrived he tore from his head a cap of spotless white velvet and stamped it into the mud, crying out, “I won’t wear you any more, I won’t! I hate you!” And then he burst into tears and flung himself full length on his face in the mud, beating the ground with his hands and muttering brokenly to himself. We paused in astonishment, but my daughter, recovering herself quickly, ran to him and put her hand on his shoulder. He sat up, startled. He rose to his feet timidly, and gazed at us with big round eyes, trying to choke back his sobs. He was mud from head to foot, and his gorgeous robe was ruined. My daughter coaxed him to tell her what was the matter, but he made no answer; instead, he pulled off the ruined robe and flung it in the mud, and standing in his shirt and breeches stamped upon it and burst into tears again, and cried, “I won’t wear it! I want to be poor! I want to be like the others! Oh, the wicked Eyebrow! Why can’t he be good like the others? Oh, if I could only cut off the Eyebrow and make him poor and good like the others!” My daughter took his hand and begged him to tell her his trouble, but all he would say was, “He’s wicked, and I want him to be good like the others! And to-night he’s going to give the Blind Bowler to Goolk the Spider, and I can’t stop him, I can’t stop him!” And he broke into a fresh storm of sobbing. My daughter shook her head at me pityingly. “We are very sorry, my lad,” said I, “and I ask you to trust us. We are going into the city, and perhaps when you know us better you will tell us all about it. We should like to help you. Will you come with us?” “What can a peddler do against the Eyebrow?” said the boy,--but he dried his tears, and allowed my daughter to lead him forth by the hand into the road. We could make nothing of the boy’s wild talk, but we went onward without questioning him further, and drew near to the city in silence. Beside the city gate, under the wall, a crowd of idle people were gathered, and from the center of the group we could hear voices singing together hoarsely. In a few minutes we were in the midst of the crowd, and saw what it was the idlers were looking at. _The Three Blind Ballad Singers_