n to please him, and the hollow "who-oo!" it made echoed over the
fields); with the deal boards and the rusty nails, and the hammer-head,
he built houses, and even cities. The jagged and splintered wooden
bricks, six inches long, were not bricks, but great beams and baulks of
timber; the wheel of the wheelbarrow was the centre of many curious
pieces of mechanism. He could see these things easily. So he sat down at
his cupboard and forgot the lecture instantly; the pout disappeared from
his lips as he plunged his hand into the inexhaustible cupboard.

"Bevis, dear," he heard presently, "you may have an apple."

Instantly, and without staying to shut the door on his treasures, he
darted upstairs--up two flights, with a clatter and a bang, burst open
the door, and was in the apple-room. It was a large garret or attic,
running half the length of the house, and there, in the autumn, the best
apples from the orchard were carried, and put on a thin layer of hay,
each apple apart from its fellow (for they ought not to touch), and each
particular sort, the Blenheim Oranges and the King Pippins, the Creepers
and the Grindstone Pippins (which grew nowhere else), divided from the
next sort by a little fence of hay.

The most of them were gone now, only a few of the keeping apples
remained, and from these Bevis, with great deliberation, chose the
biggest, measuring them by the eye and weighing them in his hand. Then
downstairs again with a clatter and a bang, down the second stairs this
time, past the gun-room, where the tools were kept, and a carpenter's
bench; then through the whole length of the ground floor from the
kitchen to the parlour slamming every door behind him, and kicking over
the chairs in front of him.

There he stayed half-a-minute to look at the hornet's nest under the
glass-case on the mantelpiece. The comb was built round a central pillar
or column, three stories one above the other, and it had been taken from
the willow tree by the brook, the huge hollow willow which he had twice
tried to chop down, that he might make a boat of it. Then out of doors,
and up the yard, and past the cart-house, when something moved in the
long grass under the wall. It was a weasel, caught in a gin.

The trap had been set by the side of a drain for rats, and the weasel
coming out, or perhaps frightened by footsteps, and hastening
carelessly, had been trapped. Bevis, biting his apple, looked at the
weasel, and the weasel said: "S