hey split into halves
beneath the sudden pressure.

The leaves still left on the sycamores were marked with large black
spots: the horse-chestnuts were quite bare; and already the tips of the
branches carried the varnish-coloured sheaths of the buds that were to
appear the following spring. These stuck to the finger if touched, as if
they really had been varnished. Through the long months of winter they
would remain, till under April showers and sunshine the sheath fell back
and the green leaflets pushed up, the two forming together a rude cross
for a short time.

The day was perfectly still, and the colours of the leaves still left
glowed in the sunbeams. Beneath, the dank bronzed fern that must soon
shrivel was wet, and hung with spiders' webs that like a slender netting
upheld the dew. The keeper swore a good deal about a certain gentleman
farmer whose lands adjoined the estate, but who held under a different
proprietor. Between these two there was a constant bickering--the tenant
angry about the damage done to his crops by the hares and rabbits, and
the keeper bitterly resenting the tenant's watch on his movements, and
warnings to his employer that all was not quite as it should be.

The tenant had the right to shoot, and he was always about in the
turnips--a terrible thorn in the side of Dickon's friend. The tenant
roundly declared the keeper a rascal, and told his master so in written
communications. The keeper declared the tenant set gins by the wood, in
which the pheasants stepped and had their legs smashed. Then the tenant
charged the keeper with trespassing; the other retorted that he decoyed
the pheasants by leaving peas till they dropped out of the pods. In
short, their hatred was always showing itself in some act of guerrilla
warfare. As we approached the part of the woods fixed on, two of the
keeper's assistants, carrying thick sticks, stepped from behind a hedge,
and reported that they had kept a good watch, and the old fox (the
tenant) had not been seen that morning. So these fellows went round to
beat, and the guns were got ready.

Sometimes you could hear the pheasants running before they reached the
low-cropped hawthorn hedge at the side of the plantation; sometimes they
came so quietly as to appear suddenly out from the ditch, having crept
through. Others came with a tremendous rush through the painted leaves,
rising just before the hedge; and now and then one flew screaming high
over the tops of