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."

"Oh!" ejaculated Nellie, in sympathy and surprise; "I'm so sorry!"

"It is `oh,' and it hurts too!" retorted he, dabbing his face tenderly
with his pocket-