es out! We know where it goes in."

"Foxes always have two holes," said Scarlett, dreamily.

"So do rabbits. Lots of holes sometimes. But we're not foxes, and
we're not rabbits."

"No; but you'll be like a water-rat directly, if you sit on that moss.
It's as slippery as can be close to the edge. Come and get some nuts."

"Not ripe enough," said Fred, idly.

"Never mind; let's get some, whether or no."

"Where shall we go? We've got all there are about the edge of the
lake."

"Let's go down there by the big oaks. There's a great clump of nuts
just beyond, where we have not been yet."

"Oh yes, we have," said Fred, laughing; "leastwise, I have--one day when
I came over and you weren't at home."

"That's always your way, Fred. I never come over to your place and take
your things."

"Halloa!" laughed Fred, rising slowly from where he had lounged upon the
mossy, buttress-like roots. "Who came and helped himself to my
gilliflower apples?"

Scarlett laughed. "Well, they looked so tempting, and we were to have
picked them that day. Come along."

They went crushing and rustling through the woody wilderness for about a
hundred yards from the side of the lake. It was a part sacred to the
birds and rabbits, a dense dark thicket where oaks and beeches shut out
the light of day, and for generations past the woodman's axe had never
struck a blow. Here and there the forest monarchs had fallen from old
age, and where they had left a vacancy hazel stubs flourished, springing
up gaily, and revelling on the rotten wood and dead leaves which covered
the ground, and among which grew patches of nuts and briar, with the
dark dewberry and swarthy dwale.

Here, as they walked, the lads' feet crushed in the moss-covered, rotten
wood, and at every step a faint damp odour of mould, mingled with the
strong scent of crushed ferns and fungi, rose to their nostrils.

"Never mind the nuts," said Fred; "let's get out in the sunshine again.
Pst! there he goes."

He stopped short as he spoke, watching the scuttling away of a rabbit,
whose white cottony tail was seen for a moment before it disappeared in
a tunnel beneath a hazel clump.

"No; we'll have a few while we are here," said Scarlett, making a bound
on to the trunk of a huge oak which had been blown down and lay
horizontally; but while one portion of its roots stood up shaggy and
weird-looking, the rest remained in the ground, and supported the life
of the old tree,