Yet this freedom of wood and moorland, this sojourning with wild creatures, that I have shown you, belonged in main to Peregrine’s boyhood. As he grew older it was not thought well, by those who had a say in the matter, that he should roam in idleness. Those who eat bread must needs earn it after some fashion, save those who are born, as the saying is, with a silver spoon in the mouth. Peregrine after a while found his hours of roaming curtailed. Armourer, falconer, grooms, alike pressed him into service. No special calling allotted him in view of the one rôle he should later play—though if the truth be known he looked to it with but little favour—he became the server of many. This, as may be imagined, irked him somewhat. He had no mind to await any man’s behest, yet mind or not he found it must needs be done. Being no fool he brought, then, to his tasks what good grace he might. Besides his work with armourer, falconer, and grooms, he learned to play the tabor, and had a very pretty skill thereon. Of these years I have little to record. They were in the main uneventful. Their chief incident as far as Peregrine was concerned, and one of deep sorrow to him, was his mother’s death. That was a sorrow which lay heavy for many a long month, till time at length began imperceptibly to ease the burden of his grief. Peregrine had come to man’s estate, had seen, I take it, four and twenty summers or thereabouts, when Nichol was stricken of the ague which was to end for him this mortal life. Lying gaunt and hollow-eyed on his bed, the cap and bells on an oak chest near, he called his son to him, pointed with one wasted hand towards the motley dress. “To-morrow, or the next day, you will be wearing it,” he said. Peregrine bowed his head. Finding it ill to lie, even for comfort’s sake, in the face of Death, he was silent. “A jest more often than not holds truth,” said Nichol, “yet now, between you and me, the truth may be spoken without need of jest.” His eyes, blue like Peregrine’s, sought his son’s eyes, but Peregrine’s were lowered. “Look at me,” said his father. Peregrine raised his eyes.