nor-houses here and there,
and in the distance palaces and towers reared their heads above the
crowding chimney-pots.

Then the players dressed themselves in fair array, and flung their
banners out, and came through Smithfield to Aldersgate, mocking the grim
old gibbet there with railing gaiety; and through the gate rode into
London town, with a long, loud cheer that brought the people crowding to
their doors, and set the shutters creaking everywhere.

Nick was bewildered by the countless shifting gables and the throngs of
people flowing onward like a stream, and stunned by the roar that seemed
to boil out of the very ground. The horses' hoofs clashed on the
unevenly paved street with a noise like a thousand smithies. The houses
hung above him till they almost hid the sky, and seemed to be reeling
and ready to fall upon his head when he looked up; so that he urged the
little roan with his uneasy heels, and wished himself out of this
monstrous ruck where the walls were so close together that there was not
elbow-room to live, and the air seemed only heat, thick and stifling,
full of dust and smells.

Shop after shop, and booth on booth, until Nick wondered where the
gardens were; and such a maze of lanes, byways, courts, blind alleys,
and passages that his simple country footpath head went all into a
tangle, and he could scarcely have told Tottenham Court road from the
river Thames.

All that he remembered afterward was that, turning from High Holborn
into the Farringdon road, he saw a great church, under Ludgate Hill,
with spire burned and fallen, and its massive tower, black with age and
smoke, staring on the town. But he was too confused to know whither they
went or what he saw in passing; for of such a forest of houses he had
never even dreamed, with people swarming everywhere like ants upon a
hill, and among them all not one kind face he knew. Through the spirit
of adventure that had roused him for a time welled up a great
heart-sickness for his mother and his home.

Out of a bewildered daze he came at last to realize this much: that the
master-player's house was very tall and very dark, standing in a dismal,
dirty street, and that it had a gloomy hallway full of shadows that
crept and wavered along the wall in the dim light of the late afternoon.

Then the master-player pushed him up a narrow staircase and along a
black corridor to a door at the end of the passage, through which he
thrust him into a darkness