They went slowly as men began to gather about them; yea, some of the
good folk that lived hard by must needs fare home to their houses to
fetch cakes and wine for the guests; and they made them sit down and
rest on the green grass by the side of the Portway, and eat and drink
to cheer their hearts; others, women and young swains, while they
rested went down into the meadows and plucked of the spring flowers,
and twined them hastily with deft and well-wont fingers into chaplets
and garlands for their heads and bodies. Thus indeed they covered
their nakedness, till the lowering faces and weather-beaten skins of
those hardly-entreated thralls looked grimly out from amidst the
knots of cowslip and oxlip, and the branches of the milk-white
blackthorn bloom, and the long trumpets of the daffodils, of the hue
that wrappeth round the quill which the webster takes in hand when
she would pleasure her soul with the sight of the yellow growing upon
the dark green web.
So they went on again as the evening was waning, and when they were
gotten within a furlong of the Gate, lo! there was come the
minstrelsy, the pipe and the tabor, the fiddle and the harp, and the
folk that had learned to sing the sweetest, both men and women, and
Redesman at the head of them all.
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