lls for the boughs.

But just as he was thinking he would ask a bee to show him the way out
(for there was not a single bird in the wood), he came to a place where
the oaks were thinner, and the space between them was covered with
bramble-bushes. Some of the blackberries were ripe, and his lips were
soon stained with their juice. Passing on from bramble-thicket to
bramble-thicket, by-and-by he shouted, and danced, and clapped his hands
with joy, for there were some nuts on a hazel bough, and they were ripe
he was sure, for the side towards the sun was rosy. He knew that nuts do
not get brown first, but often turn red towards the south. Out came his
pocket-knife, and with seven tremendous slashes, for Bevis could not do
anything steadily, off came a branch with a crook. He crooked down the
bough and gathered the nuts, there were eight on that bough, and on the
next four, and on the next only two. But there was another stole beyond,
from which, in a minute, he had twenty more, and then as he could not
stay to crack them, he crammed them into his pocket and ceased to
reckon.

"I will take fifty up to the squirrel," he said to himself, "and the
nut-crackers, and show him how to do it properly with some salt." So he
tugged at the boughs, and dragged them down, and went on from stole to
stole till he had roamed into the depths of the nut-tree wood.

Then, as he stopped a second to step over a little streamlet that oozed
along at his feet, all at once he became aware how still it was. No
birds sang, and no jay called; no woodpecker chuckled; there was not
even a robin; nor had he seen a rabbit, or a squirrel, or a dragon-fly,
or any of his friends. Already the outer rim of some of the hazel leaves
was brown, while the centre of the leaf remained green, but there was
not even the rustle of a leaf as it fell. The larks were not here, nor
the swallows, nor the rooks; the streamlet at his feet went on without a
murmur; and the breeze did not come down into the hollow. Except for a
bee, whose buzz seemed quite loud as he flew by, there was not a moving
thing. Bevis was alone; he had never before been so utterly alone, and
he stopped humming the old tune the brook had taught him, to listen.

He lifted his crook and struck the water; it splashed, but in a second
it was still again. He flung a dead branch into a tree; it cracked as it
hit a bough, on which the leaves rustled; then it fell thump, and lay
still and quiet. He stamped