The air bites a little, but I am warmly clad, and young.

Bobby sits beside me, whistling and kicking the bricks with his heels.

There is the indistinctness of fine weather over the chain of low round hills that bound our horizon, giving them a dignity that, on clearer days, they lack.

As I sit, many small and pleasant noises visit my ears, sometimes distinct, sometimes mixed together; the brook's noise, as it runs, quick and brown, between the flat, dry March fields; the gray geese's noise, as they screech all together from the farm-yard; the church-bells' noise, as they ring out from the distant town, whose roofs and vanes are shining and glinting in the morning sun.
"Do you hear the bells ?" say I."Some one has been married this morning." "Do not you wish it was you ?" asks Bobby, with a brotherly grin.
"I should not mind," reply I, picking out a morsel of mortar with my finger and thumb.

"It is about time for one of us to move off, is not it?
And Barbara has made such a signal failure hitherto, that I think it is but fair that I should try my little possible." "All I ask of you is," says Bobby, gravely, "not to take a fellow who has not got any shooting." "I will make it a _sine qua non_," I answer, seriously.
A louder screech than ever from the geese, accompanied with wing-flappings.