The leaves still left on the sycamores were marked with large black spots:  the horse-chestnuts were quite bare; and already the tips of the branches carried the varnish-coloured sheaths of the buds that were to appear the following spring.  These stuck to the finger if touched, as if they really had been varnished.  Through the long months of winter they would remain, till under April showers and sunshine the sheath fell back and the green leaflets pushed up, the two forming together a rude cross for a short time.

The day was perfectly still, and the colours of the leaves still left glowed in the sunbeams.  Beneath, the dank bronzed fern that must soon shrivel was wet, and hung with spiders’ webs that like a slender netting upheld the dew.  The keeper swore a good deal about a certain gentleman farmer whose lands adjoined the estate, but who held under a different proprietor.  Between these two there was a constant bickering—­the tenant angry about the damage done to his crops by the hares and rabbits, and the keeper bitterly resenting the tenant’s watch on his movements, and warnings to his employer that all was not quite as it should be.

The tenant had the right to shoot, and he was always about in the turnips—­a terrible thorn in the side of Dickon’s friend.  The tenant roundly declared the keeper a rascal, and told his master so in written communications.  The keeper declared the tenant set gins by the wood, in which the pheasants stepped and had their legs smashed.  Then the tenant charged the keeper with trespassing; the other retorted that he decoyed the pheasants by leaving peas till they dropped out of the pods.  In short, their hatred was always showing itself in some act of guerrilla warfare.  As we approached the part of the woods fixed on, two of the keeper’s assistants, carrying thick sticks, stepped from behind a hedge, and reported that they had kept a good watch, and the old fox (the tenant) had not been seen that morning.  So these fellows went round to beat, and the guns were got ready.

Sometimes you could hear the pheasants running before they reached the low-cropped hawthorn hedge at the side of the plantation; sometimes they came so quietly as to appear suddenly out from the ditch, having crept through.  Others came with a tremendous rush through the painted leaves, rising just before the hedge; and now and then one flew screaming high over the tops of the firs and ash-poles, his glossy neck glowing in the sunlight and his long tail floating behind.  These last pleased me most, for when the shot struck the great bird going at that rate even death could not at once arrest his progress.  The impetus carried him yards, gradually slanting downwards till he rolled in the green rush bunches.