Bromios gave each of them a mug of his best ale—and his best ale was very fine indeed—as their reward for doing guard duty. There was a buzz of excitement in the inn, now crowded beyond believing. It was filled with visitors to the village from every nation in the world, or so it seemed to Dunstan who had no sense of distance beyond the woods that surrounded the village of Wall, so he regarded the tall gentleman in the black top hat at the table beside him, all the way up from London, with as much awe as he regarded the taller ebony-colored gentleman in the white one-piece robe with whom he was dining. Dunstan knew that it was rude to stare, and that, as a villager of Wall, he had every right to feel superior to all of the “furriners.” But he could smell unfamilar spices on the air, and hear men and women speaking to each other in a hundred tongues, and he gawked and gazed unashamedly.

The man in the black silk top hat noticed that Dunstan was staring at him, and motioned the lad over to him. “D’you like treacle pudden’?” he asked abruptly, by way of introduction. “Mutanabbi was called away, and there’s more pudden’ here than a man can manage on his own.”

Dunstan nodded. The treacle pudding was steaming invitingly on its plate.

“Well then,” said his new friend, “help yourself.” He passed Dunstan a clean china bowl and a spoon. Dunstan needed no further encouragement, and he began to demolish the pudding.

“Now, young ‘un,” said the tall gentleman in the black silk top hat to Dunstan, once their bowls and the pudding-plate were quite empty, “it’d seem the inn has no more rooms; also that every room in the village has already been let.” “Is that so?” said Dunstan, unsurprised. “That it is,” said the gentleman in the top hat. “And what I was wondering was, would you know of a house that might have a room?”

Dunstan shrugged. “All the rooms have gone by now,” he said. “I remember that when I was a boy of nine, my mother and my father sent me to sleep out in the rafters of the cow byre for a week, and let my room to a lady from the Orient, and her family and servants. She left me a kite, as a thank you, and I flew it from the meadow until one day it snapped its string and flew away into the sky.”