as Chaucer's own, one of whom he makes his Clerk mention--Petrarch
of Padua. He saw, too, the fine buildings and paintings which Italian
artists were making, whose fame has spread abroad throughout world.
Chaucer loved all this colour and beauty, and carried it in his mind,
so that when he again came to London he remembered it and wrote of
it.

He was a member of Parliament, and a civil servant too, whose work it
was to collect the customs. He had to make long records of his
accounts all day; but at night returned with joy to his house above
the Aldgate in the walls of London. There he pored over his books,
and "dumb as any stone," he tells us, he read, and dreamed, and
wrote.

But when spring came, no more indoors for him! Away he went, out to
the fields, which then came to the edge of the Thames and to the very
walls of the city. There in the bright sunshine he sought his
favourite flower, the daisy, and met men in the open roads and lanes,
and because he liked men and respected them, they talked to him very
freely of their lives and doings. Often in April he saw motley
companies of men and women riding out of the stuffy narrow streets of
the town, away along country roads by hedgerow and meadow, to some
distant shrine, where they would pray to the saints for prosperity
and help.

Chaucer one day went with such a company, and he has left us his
record of it. The Canterbury Tales describe better than any history
book the people of Chaucer's time. You will find that in their dress
and manners they are often strangely different from ourselves; but in
much we are very like to them. All kinds and conditions of men are