rn there, all green and
yellow; and a tile roofed and sided farmhouse peered from an apple
orchard all pink blossoms farther on; and dotted about were the patches
like pinky snow lying thick amongst the trees, telling of golden and
ruddy russet apples in the days to come.

Here and there the land dipped down sharply into woody ravines, from out
of whose depths there were reflected back the brilliant flashes of the
sun where the little streamlets trickled down towards one that was
broader, and opened out into quite a little lake, with a hoary-looking
building at one end, where something seemed to be in motion, and, making
a telescope of his hands, he could just discern that it was a great
wheel, from which the water was falling in splashes that glistened and
sparkled in the sun. Far away the hills seemed of a pale misty blue,
near at hand they were of a golden green, and as he drank in with his
eyes the beauty of the scene beneath the brilliant blue sky Hilary Leigh
exclaimed:

"Oh! how I could enjoy all this, if I were not so jolly hungry!"

He forgot his hunger the next moment, for he caught sight of a couple of
tiny white tails seeming to run up a sandy bank, their owners, a pair of
brown rabbits, making for their holes as if ashamed of having been seen
by daylight after eating tender herbage all the night. Far above them
the bird that gave its name to the cutter was hovering in the air,
seemingly motionless at times, as it poised itself over something that
tried to hide itself in the grass.

The proceedings of the kestrel interested Hilary to no small extent as
he saw it stoop, rise, hover again, and end by making a dash down like
an arrow, and then skim along the ground and fly away without its prey.

"Like our dash after the smugglers," he said to himself; and then he
looked closer home, to see that where he was formed part of a very
ancient house, one of whose mossy-roofed, ivy-grown gables he could just
make out by pressing his cheek very hard against the iron bars. Beside
it was an orchard full of very old lichened trees, with patches of green
moss about their boles, and beyond this there seemed to be a garden in a
very neglected state, while surrounding all was a wide black moat.

"I wonder whether there's a bridge," thought Hilary, as he looked at the
smooth dark water, dotted with the broad leaves of the yellow
water-lily, and amidst the herbage of whose banks a sooty-looking
water-hen was walking de