The musician thanked her, and sat down in the porch by the beehives. It was delicious there!--bees, flowers, sunshine; on the ground the shadows of the vine-leaves that were clustering unkempt above his head; in the distance golden meadows and elm-trees, and the faint blue smoke of the town he had left behind him. Outside the porch hung a cage, in which was a skylark, the favourite cage-bird of the poor; it had been interrupted in its song by the stranger’s arrival, but now began again, and sang with as good a heart and as lusty a voice as its free brethren in the blue of heaven. “What a stream of song!” thought the musician. “He sings like good old Haydn! We can’t do that now. We don’t pour out our hearts in melody, and do just what we like with our tunes.” [Illustration: “How that bird does sing.”--P. 49.] The lark ceased for a moment, and the ticking of the big clock within the cottage suddenly called up in his mind the _andante_ of the _Clock Symphony_, and the two bassoons ticking away in thirds with that peculiar comical solemnity of theirs; and he leant back in the porch and laughed inside himself till the lark began to sing again. Then he went on mentally to the last _allegro vivace_, and caught up by its extraordinary force and vivacity, his brain was dancing away in a flood of delicious music, when the woman came out to him with a cup of tea and bread and butter. “How that bird does sing!” he said to her. “It has done me worlds of good already!” “Ah,” she answered, “he has been a good friend to us too. It was my boy that gave him to me--him as is away at sea. He sings pretty nigh all the year round, and sometimes he do make a lot of noise; but we never gets tired of him, he minds us so of our lad. Ah, ’tis a bad job when your only boy will go for to be a sailor. I never crosses the road to church of a stormy morning and sees the ripples on the puddles, but I thinks of the stormy ocean and my poor son!” The musician asked more about the sailor; and he was shown his likeness, and various relics of him that the fond mother had cherished up. And when he rose to go he shook hands with the woman warmly, and told her that he would one day bring his wife and ask for another cup of tea. Then he started off once more, refreshed as much by the milk of human kindness as by the tea and bread and butter. He soon began to feel sleepy, and looked for a quiet spot where he could lie down in the shade. Crossing two or three fields he came to a little dingle, where a stream flowed by a woodside; on the other side was a meadow studded with elms and beeches, and under the shade of one of these, close to the brook, and facing the wood, he lay down, and was soon fast asleep.