Bob and Nellie were so delighted and unsparing of their admiration of everything they saw and heard, that Dick fell to wondering at the pleasure they took in things which he held of little account. If unappreciative, however, Dick was of some service in telling Nellie the names of the principal wild-flowers; while he rose high in Bob's estimation by his lore in the matter of birds' nests, of which the ex- runaway from the country, naturally, could speak as an expert. Touching the feathered tribe generally, he was able to tell them off at a glance, with the habits and characteristics of each, as readily as Bob could repeat the Multiplication Table--more so, indeed, if the strict truth be insisted on, without stretching a point! "That be a throosh," he would say; and, "t'other, over there's, a chaffy. He ain't up to much now; but wait till he be moulted and he'll coom out foine! I've heard tell folks in furrin' parts vallies 'em greatly, though we in Guildford think nowt of they. I'd rayther a lark mysen, Master Bob." "Ah!" exclaimed Nellie, who had previously been shocked by Dick's lack of sentiment, much pleased now at this expression of a better taste--"you do like their singing then!" "Lawks no, miss," replied the unprincipled boy. "Larks is foine roasted!" Nellie was horrified. "You don't mean to say, Dick," she cried, "that--that you actually eat them?" "Aye, miss," he replied, without an atom of shame, "we doos. They be rare tasty birds!" She gave him up after this, going along by herself in silence. "This is jolly!" exclaimed Bob presently, when, after getting a little way within the park and ascending the rise leading up from the shore to an open plateau above, he saw a sort of fairy dell below, at the foot of a grassy slope, the green surface of which was speckled over with daisies and buttercups. "Come along, Nell!" Down the tempting incline he at once raced, with Nellie and Rover at his heels; and, diving beneath a jungle of blackberry-bushes at the bottom, matted together with ropes of ivy that had fallen from a withered oak, whose dry and sapless gnarled old trunk still stood proudly erect in the midst of the mass of luxuriant vegetation with which it was surrounded, Nellie heard him after a bit call out from the leafy enclosure in which he had quickly found himself--"Oh, I say, I see such a pretty fern!" There was silence then for a moment or so, as if Bob was trying to secure the object that had taken his fancy, the quietude being broken by his giving vent to a prolonged "O-o-oh!" "What's the matter?" cried Nellie, who had stopped without the briary tangle into which her brother had plunged, noticing that his accents of delight suddenly changed to those of pain. "Are you hurt?" "I've scratched my face," he said ruefully, emerging from the blackberry-brake with streaks of blood across his forehead and his nose looking as if it had been in the wars. "Some beastly thorns did it."