t be for hanging him thyself ere thou have made a day's journey
with him on the king's highway, which is not like these forest paths, I
would have thee to know. Why, he limps already."

"Then I'll carry him," said Stephen, doggedly.

"What hast thou to say to that device, Ambrose?" asked John, appealing
to the elder and wiser.

But Ambrose only answered "I'll help," and as John had no particular
desire to retain the superannuated hound, and preferred on the whole to
be spared sentencing him, no more was said on the subject as they went
along, until all John's stock of good counsel had been lavished on his
brothers' impatient ears. He bade them farewell, and turned back to the
lodge, and they struck away along the woodland pathway which they had
been told led to Winchester, though they had never been thither, nor
seen any town save Southampton and Romsey at long intervals. On they
went, sometimes through beech and oak woods of noble, almost primeval,
trees, but more often across tracts of holly underwood, illuminated here
and there with the snowy garlands of the wild cherry, and beneath with
wide spaces covered with young green bracken, whose soft irregular
masses on the undulating ground had somewhat the effect of the waves of
the sea. These alternated with stretches of yellow gorse and brown
heather, sheets of cotton-grass, and pools of white crowfoot, and all
the vegetation of a mountain side, only that the mountain was not there.

The brothers looked with eyes untaught to care for beauty, but with a
certain love of the home scenes, tempered by youth's impatience for
something new. The nightingales sang, the thrushes flew out before
them, the wild duck and moorhen glanced on the pools. Here and there
they came on the furrows left by the snout of the wild swine, and in the
open tracts rose the graceful heads of the deer, but of inhabitants or
travellers they scarce saw any, save when they halted at the little
hamlet of Minestead, where a small alehouse was kept by one Will
Purkiss, who claimed descent from the charcoal-burner who had carried
William Rufus's corpse to burial at Winchester--the one fact in history
known to all New Foresters, though perhaps Ambrose and John were the
only persons beyond the walls of Beaulieu who did not suppose the affair
to have taken place in the last generation.

A draught of ale and a short rest were welcome as the heat of the day
came on, making the old dog plod wearily on w