"Where be you, William? says the keeper."
"Here I be, sir, says the beater, with my 'eels above my 'ed."
"Wery well, William; when you get your 'ed above your 'eels, gae on."
"But I'm stuck fast between two stones! Hang the stones!" And Naylor bursts into an old seventeenth century ditty of the days of "three-man glees."
"They stoans, they stoans, they stoans, they stoans—
They stoans that built George Riddler's oven,
O they was fetched from Blakeney quarr';
And George he was a jolly old man,
And his head did grow above his har'.
"One thing in George Riddler I must commend,
And I hold it for a valiant thing;
With any three brothers in Gloucestershire
He swore that his three sons should sing.
"There was Dick the tribble, and Tom the mane,
Let every man sing in his own place;
And William he was the eldest brother,
And therefore he should sing the base.—
I'm down again! This is my thirteenth fall."
"So am I! I shall just lie and light a pipe."
"Come on, now, and look round the lee side of this crag. We shall find him bundled up under the lee of one of them."