Around the knoll on which they sat, covered by the short mossy turf, and over-canopied by a dozen oaks, such as they have been described, most of them leafy and in their prime, but two or three showing above their foliage the gray stag-horns of age, the river, clear as glass, and bright as silver, swept in a semicircle, fringed with a belt of deep green rushes and broad-leaved water-lilies, among which two or three noble swans--so quietly sat the watchers on the hill--were leading forth their little dark-gray black-legged cygnets, to feed on the aquatic flies and insects, which dimpled the tranquil river like a falling shower. Across the stream was thrown a two-arched freestone bridge, high-backed and narrow, and half covered with dense ivy, the work, evidently, of the Roman conquerors of the island, from which a yellow, sandy road wound deviously upward, skirting the foot of the rounded hill, and showing itself in two or three ascending curves, at long intervals, above the tree-tops, till it was lost in the distant forest; while, far away to the eastward, the topmost turret of what seemed a tall Norman keep, with a square banner drooping from its staff in the breezeless air, towering above the dim-wood distance, indicated whither it led so indirectly. In the rear of the slope or knoll, so often mentioned, was a deep tangled dell, or dingle, filled with a thickset growth of holly, birch, and alder, with here a feathery juniper, and there a graceful fern bush; and behind this arose a higher ridge, clothed with tall, thrifty oaks and beeches, of the second growth, and cutting off in that direction all view beyond its own near horizon. It was not in this direction, however, nor up the road toward the remote castle, nor down across the bridge over the silver Idle, that the watchers turned their eager eyes, expecting the more eagerly, as, at times, the distant woods before them--lying beyond a long stretch of native savanna, made probably by the beaver, while that industrious animal yet figured in the British fauna--seemed to mourn and labor with a deep, indefinite murmuring sound, half musical, half solemn, but liker to an echo than to any known utterance of any living human being. It was too varied for the noise of falling waters, too modulated for the wind harp of the west, which was sighing fitfully among the branches. Eagerly they watched, with a wild look of almost painful expectation in their keen, light-blue eyes, resembling in no respect the lively glance with which the jovial hunter awaits his gallant quarry; there was something that spoke of apprehension in the haggard eye--perhaps the fear of ill-performing an unwilling duty.