The path then passed through the little meadows that joined the wood: and the sunlight glistened on the dew, or rather on the hoar frost that had melted and clung in heavy drops to the grass. Here one flashed emerald; there ruby; another a pure brilliance like a diamond. Under foot by the stiles the fallen acorns crunched as they split into halves beneath the sudden pressure.
The leaves still left on the sycamores were marked with large black spots: the horse-chestnuts were quite bare; and already the tips of the branches carried the varnish-coloured sheaths of the buds that were to appear the following spring. These stuck to the finger if touched, as if they really had been varnished. Through the long months of winter they would remain, till under April showers and sunshine the sheath fell back and the green leaflets pushed up, the two forming together a rude cross for a short time.
The day was perfectly still, and the colours of the leaves still left glowed in the sunbeams. Beneath, the dank bronzed fern that must soon shrivel was wet, and hung with spiders’ webs that like a slender netting upheld the dew. The keeper swore a good deal about a certain gentleman farmer whose lands adjoined the estate, but who held under a different proprietor. Between these two there was a constant bickering—the tenant angry about the damage done to his crops by the hares and rabbits, and the keeper bitterly resenting the tenant’s watch on his movements, and warnings to his employer that all was not quite as it should be.
The tenant had the right to shoot, and he was always about in the turnips—a terrible thorn in the side of Dickon’s friend. The tenant roundly declared the keeper a rascal, and told his master so in written communications. The keeper declared the tenant set gins by the wood, in which the pheasants stepped and had their legs smashed. Then the tenant charged the keeper with trespassing; the other retorted that he decoyed the pheasants by leaving peas till they dropped out of the pods. In short, their hatred was always showing itself in some act of guerrilla warfare. As we approached the part of the woods fixed on, two of the keeper’s assistants, carrying thick sticks, stepped from behind a hedge, and reported that they had kept a good watch, and the old fox (the tenant) had not been seen that morning. So these fellows went round to beat, and the guns were got ready.