t an old silly you are! What's the game? Let's have a bit
of the fun."

"The sun--sun--sun--"

"Don't stand stuttering there in that stupid way."

"I couldn't help it--there, I'm better now. I was coming along the top
walk, and there he was right down below, sitting under his old white
mushroom."

"Well, I can't see anything to laugh at in that. He always is sitting
under his old white umbrella, painting, when he isn't throwing flies."

"But he isn't painting. He's fast asleep; and I could almost hear him
snore."

"Well, if you could hear him snore, you needn't make a hyena of
yourself. I don't see anything to laugh at in that."

"No; you never see any fun in anything. Don't you see the sun's gone
right round, and he's quite in the shade?"

"Well, suppose he is; where's the fun?"

Will Willows wiped his eyes, and then, with a mirthful look, continued--

"Oh, the idea struck me as being comic--keeping a great umbrella up when
it wasn't wanted."

"Oh, I don't know," said Josh, solemnly; "a shower might come down."

"But, I say, Josh, that won't do. I've got such a rum idea."

"Let's have it."

"Come along, then."

A few words were whispered, though there was not the slightest need, for
no one was in sight, and the rattle and whirr of machinery set in motion
by a huge water-wheel, whose splashings echoed from the vast, wall-like
sides of the lovely fern-hung glen in which it was placed, would have
drowned anything lower than a shout.

Willows' silk-mill had ages ago ceased to be a blot in one of the
fairest valleys in beautiful Derbyshire, for it was time-stained with a
rich store of colours from Nature's palette; great cushions of green
velvet moss clung to the ancient stone-work, rich orange rosettes of
lichen dotted the ruddy tiles, huge ferns shot their glistening green
spears from every crack and chasm of the mighty walls of the deep glen;
and here and there, high overhead, silver birches hung their pensile
tassels, and scrub oaks thrust out their gnarled boughs from either
side, as if in friendly vegetable feeling to grasp hands over the
rushing, babbling stream; for Beldale--Belle Dale, before the dwellers
there cut it short--formed one long series of pictures such as painters
loved, so that they came regularly from the metropolis to settle down at
one of the picturesque cottages handy to their work, and at times dotted
the dale with their white umbrellas and so-called "traps."

Nature