“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.”