When he had done, she went and looked at Miss Gale’s tablets.
“Thank you,” she said, “dear Miss Gale, but just under there write, ‘Flute.’”
So the word “Flute” was added. It was something for the child to think about while in London, a treat to look forward to, a long summer’s day to be spent among the heather, among the sheep, a fairy glen, a real fairy knoll, and dreamy music from a flute.
No sooner was Archie round the corner of the hedge and out of sight of the parson’s window, than he gave a wild whoop, like an Apache Indian, and ran off.
Kenneth came up with him before long. Not quite up with him, though, because Archie was high, high up in the sky, at an old magpie’s nest. The magpie was done with it, and Archie was tearing it down.
“The nasty old chick-chicking thing!” he explained to Kenneth; “for two years running she has used the same old nest, and it wasna hers to begin wi’, but a hoody-craw’s.”
Away went the boys together. They had a long day before them, and meant to make use of it. They were as happy as boys could be who could do as they pleased and go where they pleased, and had bread and cheese to eat when hungry.
Very practical naturalists were Kenneth and Archie. They knew nothing whatever of nomenclature, they could not have told you the Latin name of any of the hundred and one strange wild creatures they met every day in their wanderings over mountain and moorland, but about the habits of those creatures there was nothing they could not have told you.
They could have led you to the home of the red deer and moor-cock. They knew the tricks and the manners of every bird that built in hedgerow or furze bush, in thicket of spruce or pine-top or larch, in the hay or the heather or the growing corn, among sedges by the sides of lonely lochs or tarns, in banks or holes by the side of the stream, in hillock or stony cairn, or far up the mountain’s side almost at the snow line itself.