There was once an old, old castle--it was so old that its I walls and
towers and turrets and gateways and arches had crumbled to ruins, and of
all its old splendour there were only two little rooms left; and it was
here that John the blacksmith had set up his forge. He was too poor to
live in a proper house, and no one asked any rent for the rooms in the
ruin, because all the lords of the castle were dead and gone this many a
year. So there John blew his bellows, and hammered his iron, and did all
the work which came his way. This was not much, because most of the trade
went to the mayor of the town, who was also a blacksmith in quite a large
way of business, and had his huge forge facing the square of the town,
and had twelve apprentices, all hammering like a nest of woodpeckers, and
twelve journeymen to order the apprentices about, and a patent forge and
a self-acting hammer and electric bellows, and all things handsome about
him. So that of course the townspeople, whenever they wanted a horse shod
or a shaft mended, went to the mayor. And John the blacksmith struggled
on as best he could, with a few odd jobs from travellers and strangers
who did not know what a superior forge the mayor's was. The two rooms
were warm and weather-tight, but not very large; so the blacksmith got
into the way of keeping his old iron, and his odds and ends, and his
fagots, and his twopenn'orth of coal, in the great dungeon down under the
castle. It was a very fine dungeon indeed, with a handsome vaulted roof
and big iron rings, whose staples were built into the wall, very strong
and convenient for tying captives up to, and at one end was a broken
flight of wide steps leading down no one knew where.. Even the lords of
the castle in the good old times had never known where those steps led
to, but every now and then they would kick a prisoner down the steps in
their light-hearted, hopeful way, and, sure enough, the prisoners never
came back. The blacksmith had never dared to go beyond the seventh step,
and no more have I--so I know no more than he did what was at the bottom
of those stairs.

John the blacksmith had a wife and a little baby. When his wife was not
doing the housework she used to nurse the baby and cry, remembering the
happy days when she lived with her father, who kept seventeen cows and
lived quite in the country, and when John used to come courting her in
the summer evenings, as smart as smart, with a posy in his button-hole.
And now John's hair was getting grey, and there was hardly ever enough to
eat.

As for the baby, it cried a good deal at odd times; but at night, when
its mother had settled down to sleep, it would always begin to cry, quite
as a matter of course, so that she hardly got any rest at all. This made
her very tired. The baby could make up for its bad nights during the day,
if it liked, but the poor mother couldn't. So whenever she had nothing to
do she used to sit and cry, because she was tired out with work and
worry.

One evening the blacksmith was busy with his forge. He was making a
goat-shoe for the goat of a very rich lady, who wished to see how the
goat liked being shod, and also whether the shoe would come to fivepence
or sevenpence before she ordered the whole set. This was the only order
John had had that week. And as he worked his wife sat and nursed the
baby, who, for a wonder, was not crying.