“What be you doing to that tree?” said the Bailiff.
“Find out,” said Bevis. “It’s not your tree: and why don’t you say when you’re coming?”
“I saw you from the hedge,” said the Bailiff. “I was telling John where to cut the bushes from for the new harrow.” That caused the rustling in the forest. “You’ll never chop he down.”
“That we shall, if we want to.”
“No, you won’t—he stops your ship.”
“It isn’t a ship: it’s a raft.”
“Well, you can’t get by.”
“That we can.”
“I thinks you be stopped,” said the Bailiff, having now looked at the tree more carefully. “He be main thick,”—with a certain sympathy for stolid, inanimate obstruction.
“I tell you, people like us are never stopped by anything,” said Bevis. “We go through forests, and we float down rivers, and we shoot tigers, and move the biggest trees ever seen—don’t we, Mark?”