Here and there the land dipped down sharply into woody ravines, from out of whose depths there were reflected back the brilliant flashes of the sun where the little streamlets trickled down towards one that was broader, and opened out into quite a little lake, with a hoary-looking building at one end, where something seemed to be in motion, and, making a telescope of his hands, he could just discern that it was a great wheel, from which the water was falling in splashes that glistened and sparkled in the sun. Far away the hills seemed of a pale misty blue, near at hand they were of a golden green, and as he drank in with his eyes the beauty of the scene beneath the brilliant blue sky Hilary Leigh exclaimed:
“Oh! how I could enjoy all this, if I were not so jolly hungry!”
He forgot his hunger the next moment, for he caught sight of a couple of tiny white tails seeming to run up a sandy bank, their owners, a pair of brown rabbits, making for their holes as if ashamed of having been seen by daylight after eating tender herbage all the night. Far above them the bird that gave its name to the cutter was hovering in the air, seemingly motionless at times, as it poised itself over something that tried to hide itself in the grass.
The proceedings of the kestrel interested Hilary to no small extent as he saw it stoop, rise, hover again, and end by making a dash down like an arrow, and then skim along the ground and fly away without its prey.
“Like our dash after the smugglers,” he said to himself; and then he looked closer home, to see that where he was formed part of a very ancient house, one of whose mossy-roofed, ivy-grown gables he could just make out by pressing his cheek very hard against the iron bars. Beside it was an orchard full of very old lichened trees, with patches of green moss about their boles, and beyond this there seemed to be a garden in a very neglected state, while surrounding all was a wide black moat.
“I wonder whether there’s a bridge,” thought Hilary, as he looked at the smooth dark water, dotted with the broad leaves of the yellow water-lily, and amidst the herbage of whose banks a sooty-looking water-hen was walking delicately upon its long thin green toes, darting its crimson-shielded head forward and flicking its white black-barred tail at every step.
“It’s very nice to be growing a man,” mused Hilary; “but how I could enjoy being a boy again! I’ll be bound to say there’s heaps of fish in that great moat, for it looks as deep as deep.”
It was not above twenty yards from him at the nearest end, where it curved round the place that formed his prison, and from his elevated position he could command a good view.
“There, I said so!” he exclaimed; “I can see the lily leaves moving. There’s a big tench pushing about amongst the stems. Smack! That was a great carp.”
The water moved in a series of rings in the spot whence the loud smacking noise had come, and as Hilary excitedly watched the place a faint nibbling noise reached his ear. After looking about he saw what produced the sound, in the shape of a pretty little animal, that seemed to be made of the softest and finest of black velvet. It had crawled a little way up a strand of reed, and was nibbling its way through so rapidly that the reed fell over with a light splash in the water, when the little animal followed, took the cut end in its teeth, and swam across the moat, trailing the reed, and disappearing with it under some overhanging bushes, where it probably had its hole.