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Title: Collected Stories for Children -- The Three Sleeping
  Boys of Warwickshire
Date of first publication: 1947
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
  London: Faber & Faber, 1962 (reprint of 1957 edition)
Author: Walter John de la Mare (1873-1956)
Date first posted: 12 December 2007
Date last updated: 12 December 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #43

_The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire_ was written by
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), and was included in his
_Collected Stories for Children_ (1947).

This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


The Three Sleeping Boys
of Warwickshire


In a long, low-ceiled, white-washed room on the upper floor of a
red-brick building in Pleasant Street, Cheriton, ranged there in their
glazed cases, is a collection of shells, conchs, seaweeds,
sea-flowers, corals, fossils, goggling fish, stuffed birds--sea and
land--and 'mermaids'. Coffers, chests and anchors, and old guns, and
lumps of amber and ore and quartz. All sorts of outlandish oddities,
too, curiosities and junk. And there for years and years--the narrow
windows, with their carved brick fruits and flowers and old leaden
gutters, showering the day's light upon their still retreat--there for
years and years slumbered on in their great glass case the Three
Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire. The tale of them goes a long way back.
But so, too, do most tales, sad or merry, if only you will follow them
up.

About the year 1600, when Queen Elizabeth was sixty-seven, and William
Shakespeare was writing his play called 'Julius Caesar', there died,
twenty-four miles from Stratford-on-Avon, a rich miller--John James
Nollykins by name. His was the handsomest mill in Warwickshire. But
none of his neighbours--or none at least of his poorer
neighbours--could abide the sight of him. He was a morose,
close-fisted, pitiless old man. He cheated his customers and had no
mercy for those whom he enticed into his clutches.

As he grew older he had grown ever more mean and churlish until at
last he had even begun to starve his own horses. Though he died rich,
then, few of his neighbours mourned him much. And as soon as he was
gone his money began to go too. His three sons gobbled up what he had
left behind him, as jackals gobble up a lion's left supper-bones. It
slipped through their fingers like sand through a sieve. They drank,
they diced, they gambled high and low. They danced, and capered and
feasted in their finery; but they hardly knew offal from grain. Pretty
soon they began to lose not only their father's trade but also all his
savings. Their customers said that there was not only dust but stones
in the flour; and tares too. It was fusty; it smelt mousy. What cared
they? They took their terriers rat-hunting, but that was for the sake
of the sport and not of the flour. Everything about the Mill got
shabbier and shabbier--went to rack and ruin. The sails were patched.
They clacked in the wind. The rain drove in. There were blossoming
weeds in the millstream and dam where should have been nothing but
crystal water. And when their poorer customers complained, they were
greeted with drunken jeers and mockery.

At length, three or four years after the death of the miller's last
poor half-starved mare, his sons were ruined. They would have been
ruined just the same if, as one foul windy night they sat drinking and
singing together in the Mill-house, the youngest of them had not
knocked over the smoking lamp on the table, and so burned the Mill to
the ground.

The eldest--with what he could pick up--went off to Sea, and to
foreign parts, and died of yellow fever in Tobago. The second son was
taken in by an uncle who was a goldsmith in London. But he was so
stupid and indolent that he broke more than he mended; and at last, by
swallowing an exquisitely carved peach-stone from China, which had
been brought back to Italy by Marco Polo, so enraged his master that
he turned him off then and there. He went East and became a fishmonger
in Ratcliff Highway, with a shop like a booth, and a long board in
front of it. But he neglected this trade too, and at last became a
man-of-all-work (or of none) at the old Globe Theatre in Southwark,
where he saw Shakespeare dressed up as the ghost in 'Hamlet' and was
all but killed as if by accident while taking the part of the Second
Murderer in 'Macbeth'.

The youngest son, named Jeremy, married the rich widow of a saddler.
She was the owner of a fine gabled house in the High Street of the
flourishing town of Cheriton--some eight miles from Bishops
Hitchingworth. He had all the few good looks of the family, but he was
sly and crafty and hard. The first thing he did after he came home
from his honeymoon was to paint in a long red nose to the portrait of
the saddler. The next thing he did was to drown his wife's cat in the
water-butt, because he said the starveling had stolen the cheese. The
third thing he did was to burn her best Sunday bonnet, then her
wig--to keep it company. How she could bear to go on living with him
is a mystery. Nevertheless she did.

This Jeremy had three sons: Job, John and (another) Jeremy. But he did
not nourish. Far from it. The family went 'down the ladder', rung by
rung, until at long last it reached the bottom. Then it began to climb
up again. But Jeremy's children did best. His youngest daughter
married a well-to-do knacker, and _their_ only son (yet another
Jeremy), though he ran away from home because he hated water-gruel and
suet pudding, went into business as assistant to the chief sweep in
Cheriton. And, at last, having by his craft and cunning and early
rising and hardworking inherited his master's business, he bought his
great-uncle's fine gabled house, and became Master Chimney-Sweep and
'Sweep by Appointment', to the Mayor and Corporation and the Lords of
three neighbouring Manors. And _he_ never married at all. In spite of
his hard childhood, in spite of the kindness shown him by his master,
in spite of his good fortune with the three Lords of the Manor, he was
a skinflint and a pick-halfpenny. He had an enormous brush over his
door, a fine brass knocker, and--though considering all things, he had
mighty few friends--he was the best, as well as the richest
master-sweep in those parts.

But a good deal of his money and in later years most of his praise was
due to his three small orphan 'prentices--Tom, Dick and Harry. In
those days, hearths and fireplaces were as large as little rooms or
chambers, or at any rate, as large as large cupboards or closets. They
had wide warm comfortable ingle-nooks, and the chimneys were like deep
wells running up to the roof, sometimes narrowing or angling off
towards the top. And these chimneys were swept by hand.

Jeremy's 'prentices, then, had to climb up and up, from sooty brick to
brick with a brush, and sweep till they were as black as blackest
blackamoors, inside and out. Soot, soot, soot! Eyes, mouth, ears and
nose. And now and then the bricks were scorching hot, and their hands
got blistered. And now and then they were all but suffocated in the
narrow juts. And once in a while were nearly wedged there, to dry like
mummies in the dark. And sometimes, in the midst of the smother, a leg
would slip, and down they would come tumbling like apples out of a
tree or hailstones out of a cloud in April.

And Jeremy Nollykins, after tying up all the money they brought him in
fat canvas and leather bags, served them out water-gruel for supper,
and water-gruel for breakfast. For dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays he
gave them slabs of suet-pudding with lumps of suet in it like pale
amber beads; what he called soup on Mondays and Wednesdays and
Fridays; and a bit of catsmeat (bought cheap from his second cousin)
on Sundays. But then you can't climb chimneys on _no_ meat. On
Saturdays they had piping-hot pease-pudding and pottage: because on
Saturdays the Mayor's man might look in. You would hardly believe it:
but in spite of such poor mean living, in spite of their burns and
their bruises, and the soot in their eyes and lungs and in their close
lint-coloured hair, these three small boys, Tom, Dick and Harry,
managed to keep their spirits up. They even rubbed their cheeks rosy
after the week's soot had been washed off under the pump on a Saturday
night.

They were like Tom Dacre in the poem:

    _...There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
    That curled like a lamb's back was shaved: so I said
    'Hush, Tom! never mind it for when your head's bare
    You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.'_

    _And so he was quiet, and that very night
    As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
    That thousands of sleepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack
    Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black_....

Still, they always said 'Mum' to the great ladies and 'Mistress' to
the maids, and they kept their manners even when some crabbed old
woman said they were owdacious, or imperent, or mis-cheevious. And
sometimes a goodwife would give them a slice of bread pudding, or a
mug of milk, or a baked potato, or perhaps a pocket-full of cookies or
a slice of white bread (which did not remain white for very long). And
now and then, even a sip of elderberry wine. After all, even
half-starved sparrows sometimes find tit-bits, and it's not the hungry
who enjoy their victuals least.

When they _could_ scuttle away too, they would bolt off between their
jobs to go paddling in the river, or bird-nesting in the woods, or
climbing in an old stone quarry not very far from the town. It was
lovely wooded country thereabouts--near ancient Cheriton.

Whether they played truant or not, Jeremy Nollykins the Fourth--Old
Noll, as his neighbours called him--used to beat them morning, noon
and night. He believed in the rod. He spared nobody, neither man nor
beast. Tom, Dick and Harry pretty well hated old Noll: and that's a
bad thing enough. But, on the other hand, they were far too much alive
and hearty and happy when they were not being beaten, and they were
much too hungry even over their water-gruel to _think_ or to brood
over how much they hated him: which would have been very much worse.

In sober fact--with their bright glittering eyes and round cheeks and
sharp white teeth, and in spite of their skinny ribs and blistered
hands, they were a merry trio. As soon as ever their teeth stopped
chattering with the cold, and their bodies stopped smarting from Old
Noll's sauce, and their eyes from the soot, they were laughing and
talking and whistling and champing, like grasshoppers in June or
starlings in September. And though they sometimes quarrelled and
fought together, bit and scratched too, never having been taught to
fight fair, they were very good friends. Now and again too they
shinned up a farmer's fruit-trees to have a taste of his green apples.
Now and again they played tricks on old women. But what lively little
chimney-sweeps wouldn't?

They were three young ragamuffins, as wild as colts, as nimble as
kids, though a good deal blacker. And, however hard he tried, Old Noll
never managed to break them in. Never. And at night they slept as calm
and deep as cradled babies--all three of them laid in a row up in an
attic under the roof on an immense wide palliasse or mattress of
straw, with a straw bolster and a couple of pieces of old sacking for
blankets each.

Now Old Noll, simply perhaps because he was--both by nature as well as
by long practice--a mean old curmudgeonly miser, hated to see anybody
merry, or happy, or even fat. There were moments when he would have
liked to skin his three 'prentices alive. But then he wanted to get
out of them all the work he could. So he was compelled to give them
_that_ much to eat. He had to keep them alive--or the Mayor's man
would ask why. Still, it enraged him that he could not keep their
natural spirits down; that however much he beat them they 'came up
smiling'. It enraged him to know in his heart (or whatever took its
place) that though--when they had nothing better to do, or were
smarting from his rod in pickle--they detested him, they yet had never
done him an ill-turn.

Every day he would gloat on them as they came clattering down to their
water-gruel just as Giant Despair gloated on Faithful and Christian in
the dungeon. And sometimes at night he would creep up to their bare
draughty attic, and the stars or the moon would show him the three of
them lying there fast asleep on their straw mattress, the sacking
kicked off, and on their faces a faint far-away smile as if their
dreams were as peaceful as the swans in the Islands of the Blest. It
enraged him. What could the little urchins be dreaming about? What
made ugly little blackamoors grin even in their sleep? You can thwack
a wake boy, but you can't thwack a dreamer; not at least while he _is_
dreaming. So here Old Noll was helpless. He could only grind his teeth
at the sight of them. Poor Old Noll.

He ground his teeth more than ever when he first heard the music in
the night. And he might never have heard it at all if hunger hadn't
made him a mighty bad sleeper himself. A few restless hours was the
most he got, even in winter. And if Tom, Dick and Harry had ever
peeped in on _him_ as he lay in his fourpost bed, they would have
seen no smile on his old sunken face, with its long nose and long chin
and straggling hair--but only a sort of horrifying darkness. They
might even have pitied him, stretched out there, with nightmare
twisting and contorting his sharp features, and his bony fingers
continually on the twitch.

Because, then, Old Noll could not sleep of nights, he would sometimes
let himself out of his silent house to walk the streets. And while so
walking, he would look up at his neighbours' windows, glossily dark
beneath the night-sky, and he would curse them for being more
comfortable than he. It was as if instead of marrow he had malice in
his bones, and there is no fattening on that.

Now one night, for the first time in his life, except when he broke
his leg at eighteen, Old Noll had been unable to sleep at all. It was
a clear mild night with no wind, and a fine mild scrap of a moon was
in the West, and the stars shone bright. There was always a sweet
balmy air in Cheriton, borne in from the meadows that then stretched
in within a few furlongs of the town; and so silent was the hour you
could almost hear the rippling of the river among its osiers that far
away.

And as Old Nollykins was sitting like a gaunt shadow all by himself on
the first milestone that comes into the town--and he was too niggardly
even to smoke a pipe of tobacco--a faint easy wind came drifting along
the street. And then on the wind a fainter music--a music which at
first scarcely seemed to be a music at all. None the less it continued
on and on, and at last so rilled and trembled in the air that even Old
Nollykins, who was now pretty hard of hearing, caught the strains and
recognized the melody. It came steadily nearer, that music--a
twangling and tootling and a horning, a breathing as of shawms, waxing
merrier and merrier in the quick mild night October air:

    _Girls and boys, come out to play!
    The moon doth shine as bright as day;
    Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
    And come with your playfellows into the street!_...

_Girls and boys come out to play:_ on and on and on, now faint now
shrill, now in a sudden rallying burst of sound as if it came from
out of the skies. Not that the moon just then was shining as bright as
day. It was but barely in its first quarter. It resembled a bent bit
of intensely shining copper down low among the stars: or a gold basin,
of which little more than the edge showed, resting a-tilt. But little
moon or none, the shapes that were now hastening along the street,
running and hopping and skipping and skirring and dancing, had heard
the summons, had obeyed the call. From by-lane and alley, court, porch
and house-door the children of Cheriton had come pouring out like
water-streams in spring-time. Running, skipping, hopping, dancing,
they kept time to the tune. Old Noll fairly gasped with astonishment
as he watched them. What a dreadful tale to tell--and all the
comfortable and respectable folks of Cheriton fast asleep in their
beds! To think such innocents could be such wicked deceivers! To think
that gluttonous and grubby errand and shop and boot-and-shoe and pot
boys could look so clean and nimble and happy and free. He shivered;
partly because of his age and the night air, and part with rage.

But real enough though these young skip-by-nights appeared to be,
there were three queer things about them. First, there was not the
faintest sound of doors opening or shutting, or casement windows being
thrust open with a squeal of the iron rod. Next, there was not the
faintest rumour of footsteps even, though at least half the children
of Cheriton were now bounding along the street, like autumn leaves in
the wind, and all with their faces towards the East and the
water-meadows. And last, though Noll could see the very eyes in their
faces in the faint luminousness of starshine and a little moon, not a
single one of that mad young company turned head to look at him, or
showed the least sign of knowing that he was there. Clockwork images
of wood or wax could not have ignored him more completely.

Old Noll, after feeling at first startled, flabbergasted, a little
frightened even, was now in a fury. His few old teeth began to grind
together as lustily as had the millstones of Jeremy the First when he
was rich and prosperous. Nor was his rage diminished when, lo and
behold, even as he turned his head, out of his own narrow porch with
its three rounded steps and fluted shell of wood above it, came
leaping along who but his own three half-starved 'prentices, Tom, Dick
and Harry--now seemingly nine-year-olds as plump and comely to see as
if they had been fed on the fat of the land, as if they had never
never in the whole of their lives so much as tasted rod-sauce. Their
mouths were opening and shutting, too, as if they were whooping calls
one to the other and to their other street-mates, though no sound came
from them. They snapped their fingers in the air. They came cavorting
and skirling along in their naked feet to the strains of the music as
if bruised elbows, scorched shins, cramped muscles and iron-bound
clogs had never once pestered their young souls. Yet not a sound, not
a whisper, not a footfall could the deaf old man hear--nothing but
that sweet, shrill and infuriating music.

In a few minutes the streets were empty, a thin fleece of cloud had
drawn across the moon, and only one small straggler was still in
sight, a grandson of the Mayor. He was last merely because he was
least, and had nobody to take care of him. And Old Noll, having
watched this last night-truant out of sight, staring at him with eyes
like marbles beneath his bony brows, hobbled back across the street to
his own house, and after pausing awhile at the nearest doorpost to
gnaw his beard and think what next was to be done, climbed his three
flights of shallow oak stairs until he came to the uppermost landing
under the roof. There at last with infinite caution he lifted the pin
of the door of the attic and peered in on what he supposed would be an
empty bed. Empty! Not a bit of it! Lying there asleep, in the dim
starlight of the dusty dormer window, he could see as plain as can be
the motionless shapes of his three 'prentices, breathing on so calmly
in midnight's deepmost slumber that he even ventured to fetch in a
tallow candle in a pewter stick in order that he might examine them
more closely.

In its smoky beams he searched the three young slumbering faces. They
showed no sign that the old skinflint was stooping as close over them
as a bird-snarer over his nets. There were smears of soot even on
their eye-lids and the fine dust of it lay thick on the flaxen
lambs'-wool of their close-shorn heads. They were smiling away, gently
and distantly as if they were sitting in their dreams in some
wonderful orchard, supping up strawberries and cream; as though the
spirits within them were un-tellably happy though their bodies were as
fast asleep as humming-tops or honey-bees in winter.

Stair by stair Old Nollykins crept down again, blew out his candle,
and sat down on his bed to think. He was a cunning old miser, which is
as far away from being generous and wise as the full moon is from a
farthing dip. His fingers had itched to wake his three sleeping
chimney-boys with a smart taste of his rod, just to 'larn them a
lesson'. He hated to think of the quiet happy smile resting upon their
faces while the shadow-shapes or ghosts of them were out and away,
pranking and gallivanting in the green water-meadows beyond the town.
How was he to know that his dimming eyes had not deluded him?
Supposing he went off to the Mayor himself in the morning and told his
midnight tale, who would believe it? High and low, everybody hated
him, and as like as not they would shut him up in the town jail for a
madman, or burn his house about his ears supposing him to be a wizard.
'No, no, no!' he muttered to himself. 'We must watch and wait, friend
Jeremy, and see what we _shall_ see.'

Next morning his three 'prentices, Tom, Dick and Harry, were up and
about as sprightly as ever, a full hour before daybreak. You might
have supposed from their shining eyes and apple cheeks that they had
just come back from a long holiday on the blissful plains of paradise.
Away they tumbled--merry as frogs--to work, with their brushes and
bags, still munching away at their gritty oatcakes--three parts bran
to one of meal.

So intent had Old Noll been on watching from his chimney-corner what
he could see in their faces at breakfast, and on trying to overhear
what they were whispering to each other, that he forgot to give them
their usual morning dose of stick. But not a word had been uttered
about the music or the dancing or the merry-making at the
water-meadows. They just chattered their usual scatter-brained
gibberish to one another--except when they saw that the old creature
was watching them; and he was speedily convinced that whatever
adventures their dream-shapes may have had in the night-hours, these
had left no impression on their waking minds.

Poor Old Noll. An echo of that music and the sight he had seen kept
him awake for many a night after, and his body was already shrunken by
age and by his miserly habits to nothing much more substantial than a
bag of animated bones. And yet all his watching was in vain. So weary
and hungry for sleep did he become, that when at last the hunter's
moon shone at its brightest and roundest over the roofs of Cheriton,
he nodded off in his chair. He was roused a few hours afterwards by a
faint glow in his room that was certainly not moonlight, for it came
from out of the black dingy staircase passage. Instantly he was wide
awake--but too late. For, even as he peeped through the door-crack,
there flitted past his three small 'prentices--just the ghosts or the
spirits or the dream-shapes of them--faring happily away. They passed
him softer than a breeze through a willow tree and were out of sight
down the staircase before he could stir.

The morning after the morning after that, when Tom, Dick and Harry
woke up at dawn on their mattress, there was a wonderful rare smell in
the air. They sniffed it greedily as they looked at one another in the
creeping light of daybreak. And sure enough, as soon as they were in
their ragged jackets and had got down to their breakfast, the old
woman who came to the house every morning to do an hour or two's
charing for Old Nollykins, came waddling up to the kitchen table with
a frying-pan of bacon frizzling in its fat.

'There, me boys,' said Old Noll, rubbing his hands together with a
cringing smile, 'there's a rasher of bacon for ye all, and sop in the
pan to keep the cold out, after that long night-run in the moonlight.'

He creaked up his eyes at them finger on nose; but all three of them,
perched up there on their wooden stools the other side of the table,
only paused an instant in the first polishing up of their plates with
a crust of bread to stare at him with such an innocent astonishment on
their young faces that he was perfectly sure they had no notion of
what he meant.

'Aha,' says he, 'do ye never dream, me boys, tucked up snug under the
roof in that comfortable bed of yours? D'ye never dream?--never hear a
bit of a tune calling, or maybe see what's called a nightmare? Lordee,
when I was young there never went a night but had summat of a dream to
it.'

'Dream!' said they, and looked at one another with their mouths half
open. 'Why, if you ax me, Master,' says Tom, 'I dreamed last night it
was all bright moonshine, and me sitting at supper with the gentry.'

'And I,' says Dick, I dreamed I was dancing under trees and bushes all
covered over with flowers. And I could hear 'em playing on harps and
whistles.'

'And me,' says Harry, 'I dreamed I was by a river, and a leddy came
out by a green place near the water and took hold of my hand. I
suppose, Master, it must have been my mammie, though I never seed her
as I knows on.'

At all this the cringing smile on Old Nollykins' face set like grease
in a dish, because of the rage in his mind underneath. And he leaped
up from where he sat beside the skinny little fire in the immense
kitchen hearth. '"Gentry"! "Harps"! "Mammie"!' he shouted, 'you
brazen, ungrateful, greedy little deevils. Be off with ye, or ye shall
have such a taste of the stick as will put ye to sleep for good and
all.'

And almost before they had time to snatch up their bags and their
besoms, he had chased them out of the house. So there in the little
alley beside the garden, sheltering as close to its wall as they could
from the cold rain that was falling, they must needs stand chattering
together like drenched jackdaws, waiting for the angry old man to come
out and to send them about the business of the day.

But Old Nollykins' dish of bacon fat had not been altogether wasted.
He knew now that the young rapscallions only _dreamed_ their nocturnal
adventures, and were not in the least aware that they themselves in
actual shadow-shape went off by night to the trysting-place of all
Cheriton's children to dance and feast and find delight. But he
continued to keep watch, and would again and again spy in on his three
'prentices lying asleep together on their mattress up in the attic, in
the hope of catching them in the act of stealing out. But although at
times he discerned the same gentle smile upon their faces, shining
none the less serenely for the white gutter-marks of tears on their
sooty cheeks, for weeks together he failed to catch any repetition of
the strains of the strange music or the faintest whisper of their
dream-shapes coming and going on the wooden stairs.

Nevertheless, the more he brooded on what he had seen, the more he
hated the three urchins, and the more bitterly he resented their merry
ways. The one thing he could not decide in his mind was whether when
next, if ever, he caught them at their midnight tricks, he should at
once set about their slumbering bodies with his stick or should wait
until their dream-wraiths were safely away and then try to prevent
them from coming back. Then indeed they might be at his mercy.

Now there was an old crone in Cheriton who was reputed to be a witch.
She lived in a stone hovel at the far end of a crooked alley that ran
beside the very walls of Old Nollykins' fine gabled house. And Old
Nollykins, almost worn to a shadow, knocked one dark evening at her
door. She might have been the old man's grandmother as she sat there,
hunched up in her corner beside the great iron pot simmering over the
fire. He mumbled out his story about his three 'thieving, godless
little brats', and then sat haggling over the price he should pay for
her counsel. And even then he hoped to cheat her. At last he put his
crown in her shrunken paw.

Waken a sleeper, she told him, before his dream-shape can get back
into his mortal frame, it's as like as not to be sudden death. But
keep the wandering dream-shape out _without_ rousing his sleeping
body, then he may for ever more be your slave, and will never grow any
older. And what may keep a human's dream-shape out--or animal's
either--she said, is a love-knot of iron the wrong way up or a rusty
horseshoe upside down, or a twisted wreath of elder and ash fastened
up with an iron nail over the keyhole--and every window shut. Brick
walls and stone and wood are nothing to such wanderers. But they can't
abide iron. And what she said was partly true and partly false; and it
was in part false because the foolish old man had refused to pay the
crone her full price.

He knew well, and so did she, that there was only a wooden latch to
his door, because he had been too much of a skinflint to pay for one
of the new iron locks to be fixed on. He had no fear of thieves,
because he had so hidden his money that no thief on earth would be
able to find it, not if he searched for a week. So he asked the old
woman again, to make doubly sure, how long a natural human creature
would live and work if his dream-shape never came back. 'Why, that,'
she cheepered, leering up at him out of her wizened old face, 'that
depends how young they be; what's the blood, and what's the heart.
Take 'em in the first bloom,' she said, 'and so they keeps.' She had
long ago seen what the old man was after, and had no more love for him
than for his three noisy whooping chimney-sweeps.

Very unwillingly he dropped another piece of money into her skinny
palm and went back to his house, not knowing that the old woman, to
avenge herself on his skinflint ways, had told him only half the
story. That evening his three 'prentices had a rare game of
hide-and-seek together in the many-roomed old rat-holed house; for
their master had gone out. The moment they heard his shuffling
footsteps in the porch they scampered off to bed, and were to all
appearance fast asleep before he could look in on them.

He had brought back with him a bundle of switches of elder and ash, a
ten-penny nail, a great key, and a cracked horseshoe. And, strange to
say, the iron key which he had bought from a dealer in broken metal
had once been the key of the Mill of rich old Jeremy the First at
Stratford-on-Avon! He pondered half that night on what the old woman
had said, and 'surely', said he to himself, 'their blood's fresh
enough, my old stick keeps them out of mischief, and what is better
for a green young body than a long day's work and not too much to eat,
and an airy lodging for the night?' The cunning old creature supposed
indeed, that if only by this sorcery and hugger-mugger he could keep
their wandering dream-shapes from their bodies for good and all, his
three young 'prentices would never age, never weary, but stay lusty
and nimble perhaps for a century. Ay, he would use them as long as he
wanted them, and sell them before he died. _He'd_ teach them to play
truant at night, when honest folk were snoring in their beds. For the
first time for weeks his mingy supper off a crust and a ham-bone and a
mug of water had tasted like manna come down from the skies.

The very next day chanced to be St. Nicholas's Day. And those were the
times of old English winters. Already a fine scattering of snow was on
the ground, like tiny white lumps of sago, and the rivers and ponds
were frozen hard as iron. Better still, there was all but a fine full
moon that night, and the puddles in Cheriton High Street shone like
Chinese crystal in the beams slanting down on them from between the
eaves of the houses.

For five long hours of dark, after his seven o'clock supper, Old
Nollykins managed to keep himself awake. Then, a little before
midnight, having assured himself that his three 'prentices were sound
asleep in their bed, he groped downstairs again, gently lifted the
latch and looked out. There was never such a shining scene before. The
snow on the roofs and gables and carved stonework of the houses
gleamed white and smooth as the finest millers' meal. There was not a
soul, not even a cat, to be seen in the long stretch of the lampless
street. And the stars in the grey-blue sky gleamed like dewdrops on a
thorn.

Sure enough, as soon as ever the last stroke of midnight had sounded
from St. Andrew's tower, there came faintly wreathing its way out of
the distance the same shrill penetrating strains of the ancient tune.
Lord bless me, if Old Nollykins had had but one sole drop of the blood
of his own youth left in his veins he could not have resisted dancing
his old bones out of his body down his steps and into the crudded High
Street at the sound of it:

    _Girls and boys, come out to play!
    The moon doth shine as bright as day;
    Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
    And come with your playfellows into the street!_...

But, instead, he shuffled like a rat hastily back into the house
again; pushed himself in close under the staircase; and
waited--leaving the door ajar.

Ho, ho, what's that? Faint flitting lights were now showing in the
street, and a sound as of little unhuman cries, and in a minute or two
the music loudened so that an old glass case on a table near by
containing the model of a brig which had belonged to Old Nollykins'
wicked grandfather who had died in Tobago, fairly rang to the
marvellous stirrings on the air. And down helter-skelter from their
bed, just as they had slipped in under its sacking--in their breeches
and rags of day-shirts, barefoot, came whiffling from stair to stair
the ghosts of his three small 'prentices. Old Nollykins hardly had
time enough to see the wonderful smile on them, to catch the gleam of
the grinning white teeth shining beneath their parted lips, before
they were out and away.

Shivering all over, as if with the palsy, the old man hastened up the
staircase, and in a minute or two the vacant house resounded with the
strokes of his hammer as he drove in the ten-penny nail into the
keyhole above the attic door, and hung up key and horseshoe by their
strings. This done, he lowered his hammer and listened. Not the
faintest whisper, sigh or squeak came from within. But in dread of
what he might see he dared not open the door.

Instead, curiosity overcame him. Wrapping a cloak round his skinny
shoulders he hurried out into the street. Sure enough, here, there,
everywhere in the snow and hoarfrost were footprints--traces at any
rate distinct enough for _his_ envious eyes, though they were hardly
more than those of the skirring of a hungry bird's wing on the surface
of the snow. And fondly supposing in his simplicity that he had now
safely cheated his 'prentices, that for ever more their poor young
empty bodies would be at his beck and call, Old Noll determined to
follow away out of the town and into the water-meadows the dream
shapes of the children now all of them out of sight. On and on he went
till his breath was whistling in his lungs and he could scarcely drag
one foot after the other.

And he came at last to where, in a loop of the Itchen, its waters
shining like glass in the moon, there was a circle of pollard and
stunted willows. And there, in the lush and frosty grasses was a
wonderful company assembled, and unearthly music ascending, it seemed,
from out of the bowels of a mound near by, called Caesar's Camp. And
he heard a multitude of voices and singing from within. And all about
the meadow wandered in joy the sleep-shapes not only of the children
from Cheriton, but from the farms and cottages and gipsy camps for
miles around. Sheep were there too, their yellow eyes gleaming in the
moon as he trod past them. But none paid any heed to the children or
to the 'strangers' who had called them out of their dreams.

Strange indeed were these strangers: of middle height, with garments
like spider-web, their straight hair of the colour of straw falling
gently on either side their narrow cheeks, so that it looked at first
glimpse as if they were grey-beards. And as they trod on their narrow
feet, the frozen grasses scarcely stirring beneath them, they turned
their faces from side to side, looking at the children. And then a
fairness that knows no change showed in their features, and their eyes
were of a faint flame like that of sea-water on nights of thunder when
the tide gently lays its incoming ripples on some wide flat sandy
strand of the sea.

And at sight of them Old Nollykins began to be mortally afraid. Not a
sign was there of Tom, Dick or Harry. They must have gone into the
sonorous mound--maybe were feasting there, if dream-shapes feast. The
twangling and trumpeting and incessant music made his head spin round.
He peered about for a hiding-place, and at length made his way to one
of the old gnarled willows beside the icy stream. There he might have
remained safe and sound till morning, if the frost, as he dragged
himself up a little way into the lower branches of the tree, had not
risen into his nostrils and made him sneeze. There indeed he might
have remained safe and sound if he had _merely_ sneezed, for an old
man's sneeze is not much unlike an old sheep's wheezy winter cough.
But such was this poor old man's alarm and terror at the company he
had stumbled into that he cried, 'God bless us!' after his
sneeze--just as his mother had taught him to do.

That was the end of wicked old Nollykins; as it was his first step on
the long road of repentance. For the next thing he remembered was
opening his eyes in the half-light of stealing dawn and finding
himself perched up in the boughs of a leafless willow-tree, a thin
mist swathing the low-lying water-meadows, the sheep gently browsing
in the grasses, leaving green marks in the frosty grass as they
munched onwards. And such an ache and ague was in Old Noll's bones as
he had never, since he was swaddled, felt before. It was as if every
frosty switch of every un-polled willow in that gaunt fairy circle by
the Itchen had been belabouring him of its own free will the whole
night long. His heart and courage were gone. Sighing and groaning, he
lowered himself into the meadow, and by the help of a fallen branch
for staff made his way at last back into the town.

It was early yet even for the milkmaids, though cocks were crowing
from their frosty perches, and the red of the coming sun inflamed the
eastern skies. He groped into his house and shut the door. With many
rests on the way from stair to stair he hoisted himself up, though
every movement seemed to wrench him joint from joint, until at last he
reached the attic door. He pressed his long ear against the panel and
listened a moment. Not a sound. Then stealthily pushing it open inch
by inch, he thrust forward his shuddering head and looked in.

The ruddy light in the East was steadily increasing, and had even
pierced through the grimy panes of the dormer window as though to
light up the slumbers of his small chimney-sweeps. It was a Sunday
morning and their fair skins and lamb's-wool heads showed no trace of
the week's soot. But while at other times on spying in at them it
looked to Old Nollykins as if their smiling faces were made of wax,
now they might be of alabaster. For each one of the three--Tom, Dick,
and Harry--was lying on his back, their chapped, soot-roughened hands
with the torn and broken nails resting on either side of their bodies.
No smile now touched their features, but only a solemn quietude as of
images eternally at rest. And such was the aspect of the three
children that even Old Nollykins dared not attempt to waken them
because he knew in his heart that no earthly rod would ever now bestir
them out of this sound slumber. Not at least until their spirits had
won home again. And the soured old crone was not likely to aid him in
that.

He cursed the old woman, battering on her crazy door, but she paid him
no heed. And at last, when the Cheriton Church bells began ringing the
people to morning service, there was nothing for it, if there was any
hope of saving his neck, but to go off to the Mayor's man, dragging
himself along the street on a couple of sticks, to tell him that his
'prentices were dead.

Dead they were not, however. The Mayor's man fetched a doctor, and the
doctor, after putting a sort of wooden trumpet to their chests,
asseverated that there was a stirring under the cage of their ribs.
They were fallen into a trance, he said. What is called a _catalepsy_.
It was a dreamlike seizure that would presently pass away. But though
the old midwife the doctor called in heated up salt, for salt-bags,
and hour by hour put a hot brick fresh from the fire to each
'prentice's stone-cold feet, by not a flutter of an eyelid nor the
faintest of sighs did any one of the three prove that he was alive or
could heed.

There they lay, on their straw pallet, motionless as mummies, still
and serene, lovely as any mother might wish, with their solemn
Sunday-morning soap-polished cheeks and noses and foreheads and chins,
and as irresponsive as cherubs made of stone.

And the Mayor of the Town, after listening to all Old Nollykins could
say, fined him Five Bags of Guineas for allowing his three 'prentices
to fall into a catalepsy for want of decent food and nourishment. And
what with the pain of his joints and the anguish of having strangers
tramping all over his house, and of pleading with the Mayor, and of
seeing his money fetched out from its hiding-places and counted out on
the table, the miserable old man was so much dazed and confused that
he never thought to take down the wreath of ash and elder and the
horseshoe and the key. That is why, when a week or two had gone by and
no sign had shown how long this trance would continue, the Mayor and
Councillors decided that as Tom, Dick and Harry could be of no further
use to the town as chimney-sweeps, they might perhaps earn an honest
penny for it as the 'Marvels of the Age'.

So the Mayor's man with a flowing white muslin band round his black
hat, and his two mutes--carrying bouquets of lilies in their
hands--came with his handcart and fetched the three bodies away. A
roomy glass case had been made for them of solid Warwickshire oak,
with a fine chased lock and key. And by the time the Waits had begun
to sing their Christmas carols in the snow, the three children had
been installed in this case on the upper floor of the Cheriton Museum,
and there lay slumbering on and on, quiet as Snow-White in the dwarfs'
coffin, the gentle daylight falling fairly on their quiet
faces--though during the long summer days a dark blind was customarily
drawn over the glass whenever the sun shone in too fiercely at the
window.

News of this wonder spread fast, and by the following Spring visitors
from all over the world--even from cities as remote as Guanojuato and
Seringapatam--came flocking into Warwickshire merely to gaze a while
at the sleeping Chimney-Sweeps: at 6d. a time. After which a fair
proportion of them went on to Stratford to view the church where lie
William Shakespeare's honoured bones. Indeed Mrs. Giles, the old woman
who set up an apple and ginger-bread stall beside the Museum, in a
few years made so much money out of her wares that she was able to
bring up her nine orphaned grandchildren all but in comfort, and to
retire at last at the age of sixty to a four-roomed cottage not a
hundred yards from that of Anne Hathaway's herself.

In course of time the Lord-Lieutenant and the Sheriffs and the
Justices of the Peace and the Bishop and the mayors of the
neighbouring towns, jealous no doubt of this fame and miracle in their
midst, did their utmost to persuade and compel the Mayor and
Corporation of Cheriton to remove the Boys to the county-town--the
Earl himself promising to lodge them in an old house not a
stone's-throw distant from the lovely shrine of his ancestors,
Beauchamp Chapel. But all in vain. The people of Cheriton held tight
to their rights: and the Lord Chief Justice after soberly hearing both
sides at full length wagged his wigged head in their favour.

For fifty-three years the Sleeping Boys slept on. During this period
the Town Council had received One Hundred and Twenty Three Thousand,
Five Hundred and Fifty-Five sixpences in fees alone (i.e. 3,088 17s.
6d.). And nearly every penny of this vast sum was almost clear profit.
They spent it wisely too--widened their narrow chimneys, planted
lime-trees in the High Street and ash and willow beside the river,
built a fountain and a large stone dove-cot, and set apart a wooded
meadowland with every comfort wild creatures can hope to have bestowed
on them by their taskmaster, Man.

Then, one fine day, the curator--the caretaker--of the Museum, who for
forty years had never once missed dusting the 'prentices' glass case
first thing in the morning, fell ill and had to take to his bed. And
his niece, a pretty young thing, nimble and high-spirited, came as his
deputy for a while, looked after the Museum, sold the tickets, and
kept an eye on the visitors in his stead. She was only seventeen; and
was the very first person who had ever been heard to sing in the
Museum--though of course it was only singing with her lips all but
closed, and never during show-hours.

And it was Summer-time, or rather the very first of May. And as each
morning she opened the great door of the Museum and ascended the wide
carved staircase and drew up the blinds of the tall windows on the
upper floor, and then turned--as she always turned--to gaze at the
Three Sleepers (and not even a brass farthing to pay), she would utter
a deep sigh as if out of the midst of a happy dream.

'You lovely things!' she would whisper to herself. 'You lovely, lovely
things!' She had a motherly heart; and the wisps of her hair were as
transparent as the E-string of a fiddle in the morning light. And the
glance of her blue eyes rested on the glass case with such compassion
and tenderness that if mere looking could have awakened the children
they would have been dancing an Irish jig with her every blessed
morning.

Being young, too, she was inclined to be careless, and had even at
times broken off a tiny horn of coral, or a half-hidden scale from the
mermaid's tail for a souvenir of Cheriton to any young stranger that
particularly took her fancy. Moreover, she had never been told
anything about the magicry of keys or horseshoes or iron or ash or
elder, having been brought up at a School where wizardry and
witchcraft were never so much as mentioned during school hours. How
could she realize then that the little key of the glass case and the
great key of the Museum door (which, after opening both, she had
dropped out of her pocket by accident plump into the garden well)
could keep anybody or anything out, or in, even when the doors were
wide open? Or that water can wash even witchcraft away?

That very morning there had been such a pomp of sunshine in the sky,
and the thrushes were singing so shrilly in the new-leafed lime trees
as she came along to her work, that she could resist her pity and
yearning no longer. Having drawn up the blinds on the upper floor, in
the silence she gently raised the three glass lids of the great glass
case and propped them back fully open. And one by one--after first
listening at their lips as stealthily as if in hope of hearing what
their small talk might be in their dreams--she kissed the slumbering
creatures on their stone-cold mouths. And as she kissed Harry she
fancied she heard a step upon the stair. And she ran out at once to
see.

No one. Instead, as she stood on the wide staircase listening, her
young face tilted and intent, there came a waft up it as of spiced
breezes from the open spaces of Damascus. Not a sound, no more than a
breath, faint and yet almost unendurably sweet of Spring--straight
across from the bird-haunted, sheep-grazed meadows skirting the
winding river: the perfume of a whisper. It was as if a distant memory
had taken presence and swept in delight across her eyes. Then
stillness again, broken by the sounding as of a voice smaller than the
horn of a gnat. And then a terrible sharp crash of glass. And out
pell-mell came rushing our three young friends, the chimney-sweeps,
their dream-shapes home at last.

Now Old Nollykins by this time had long been laid in his grave. So
even if anyone had been able to catch them, Tom, Dick, and Harry would
have swept no more chimneys for him. Nor could even the new Mayor
manage it. Nor the complete Town Council. Nor the Town Crier, though
he cried twice a day to the end of the year: 'O-yess! O-yess!!
O-yess!!! Lost, stolen, or strayed: Three World-Famous and Notorious
Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire.' Nor even the Lord-Lieutenant. Nor even
the mighty Earl.

As for the mound by the pollard willows--well, what clever Wide-awake
would ever be able to give any news of that?


[End of _The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire_
by Walter de la Mare]