ying their sketching apparatus with them.

It was probably a bad day for scent; for they had not been gone a
quarter of an hour when Tom came home, deposited his gun, and
followed on their steps. He found them sitting under the lee of a
high bank, sufficiently intent on their drawings, but neither
surprised nor sorry to find that he had altered his mind, and
come back to interrupt them. So he lay down near them, and talked
of Oxford and Englebourn, and so from one thing to another, till
he got upon the subject of nutting, and the sylvan beauties of a
neighbouring wood. Mary was getting on badly with her drawing,
and jumped at the idea of a ramble in the wood; but Katie was
obdurate, and resisted all their solicitations to move. She
suggested, however, that they might go; and, as Tom declared that
they should not be out of call, and would be back in half an hour
at furthest, Mary consented; and they left the sketcher and
strolled together out of the fields, and into the road, and so
through a gate into the wood. It was a pleasant oak wood. The
wild flowers were over, but the great masses of ferns, four or
five feet high, made a grand carpet round the stems of the forest
monarchs, and a fitting couch for here and there one of them
which had been lately felled, and lay in fallen majesty, with
bare shrouded trunk awaiting the sawyers. Further on, the hazel
underwood stood thickly on each side of the green rides, down
which they sauntered side by side. Tom talked of the beauty of
the wood in spring-time, and the glorious succession of
colouring--pale yellow, and deep blue and white, and
purple--which the primroses, and hyacinths and starwort, and
foxgloves gave, each in their turn, in the early year, and
mourned over their absence. But Mary preferred Autumn, and would
not agree with him. She was enthusiastic for ferns and heather.
He gathered some sprigs of the latter for her, from a little
sandy patch which they passed, and some more for his own
button-hole, and then they engaged in the absorbing pursuit of
nutting, and the talk almost ceased. He caught the higher
branches, and bent them down to her, and watched her as she
gathered them, and wondered at the ease and grace of all her
movements, and the unconscious beauty of her attitudes. Soon she
became more enterprising herself, and made little excursions into
the copse, surmounting briers, and passing through tangled places
like a Naiad, before he could be there to hel