The room was not unlike a stable. The low ceiling, smoke-blackened
and dingy, was pierced by several square trap-doors with rough-hewn
ladders leading up to them. The walls of bare unpainted planks
were studded here and there with great wooden pins, placed at
irregular intervals and heights, from which hung over-tunics,
wallets, whips, bridles, and saddles. Over the fireplace were
suspended six or seven shields of wood, with coats-of-arms rudely
daubed upon them, which showed by their varying degrees of
smokiness and dirt that they had been placed there at different
periods. There was no furniture, save a single long dresser
covered with coarse crockery, and a number of wooden benches and
trestles, the legs of which sank deeply into the soft clay floor,
while the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by
three torches stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and
crackled, giving forth a strong resinous odor. All this was
novel and strange to the cloister-bred youth; but most
interesting of all was the motley circle of guests who sat eating
their collops round the blaze. They were a humble group of
wayfarers, such as might have been found that night in any inn
through the length and breadth of England; but to him they
represented that vague world against which he had been so
frequently and so earnestly warned. It did not seem to him from
what he could see of it to be such a very wicked place after all.

Three or four of the men round the fire were evidently
underkeepers and verderers from the forest, sunburned and
bearded, with the quick restless eye and lithe movements of the
deer among which they lived. Close to the corner of the chimney
sat a middle-aged gleeman, clad in a faded garb of Norwich cloth,