“What have you come for, old man?”

Felix smiled.  Quaint way to put it!

“For a talk.”

“Ah!” said Tod, and he whistled.

A largish, well-made dog with a sleek black coat, white underneath, and a black tail white-tipped, came running up, and stood before Tod, with its head rather to one side and its yellow-brown eyes saying:  ’I simply must get at what you’re thinking, you know.’

“Go and tell your mistress to come—­Mistress!”

The dog moved his tail, lowered it, and went off.

“A gypsy gave him to me,” said Tod; “best dog that ever lived.”

“Every one thinks that of his own dog, old man.”

“Yes,” said Tod; “but this is.”

“He looks intelligent.”

“He’s got a soul,” said Tod.  “The gypsy said he didn’t steal him, but he did.”

“Do you always know when people aren’t speaking the truth, then?”

“Yes.”

At such a monstrous remark from any other man, Felix would have smiled; but seeing it was Tod, he only asked:  “How?”

“People who aren’t speaking the truth look you in the face and never move their eyes.”

“Some people do that when they are speaking the truth.”

“Yes; but when they aren’t, you can see them struggling to keep their eyes straight.  A dog avoids your eye when he’s something to conceal; a man stares at you.  Listen!”

Felix listened and heard nothing.

“A wren”; and, screwing up his lips, Tod emitted a sound:  “Look!”

Felix saw on the branch of an apple-tree a tiny brown bird with a little beak sticking out and a little tail sticking up.  And he thought:  ’Tod’s hopeless!’

“That fellow,” said Tod softly, “has got his nest there just behind us.”  Again he emitted the sound.  Felix saw the little bird move its head with a sort of infinite curiosity, and hop twice on the branch.

“I can’t get the hen to do that,” Tod murmured.

Felix put his hand on his brother’s arm—­what an arm!

“Yes,” he said; “but look here, old man—­I really want to talk to you.”

Tod shook his head.  “Wait for her,” he said.

Felix waited.  Tod was getting awfully eccentric, living this queer, out-of-the-way life with a cranky woman year after year; never reading anything, never seeing any one but tramps and animals and villagers.  And yet, sitting there beside his eccentric brother on that fallen tree, he had an extraordinary sense of rest.  It was, perhaps, but the beauty and sweetness of the day with its dappling sunlight brightening the apple-blossoms, the wind-flowers, the wood-sorrel, and in the blue sky above the fields those clouds so unimaginably white.  All the tiny noises of the orchard, too, struck on his ear with a peculiar meaning, a strange fulness, as if he had never heard such sounds before.  Tod, who was looking at the sky, said suddenly: