So forth we set, May and I, and Saladin and the brindle; May and
myself walking with the sedateness and decorum befitting our sex and
age (she is five years old this grass, rising six)--the young
things, for the soldan and the brindle are (not meaning any
disrespect) little better than puppies, frisking and frolicking as
best pleased them.

Our route lay for the first part along the sheltered quiet lanes
which lead to our old habitation; a way never trodden by me without
peculiar and homelike feelings, full of the recollections, the pains
and pleasures, of other days. But we are not to talk sentiment
now;--even May would not understand that maudlin language. We must
get on. What a wintry hedgerow this is for the eighteenth of April!
Primrosy to be sure, abundantly spangled with those stars of the
earth,--but so bare, so leafless, so cold! The wind whistles
through the brown boughs as in winter. Even the early elder shoots,
which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small
leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are
of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's elbows on a snowy
morning. The very birds, in this season of pairing and building,
look chilly and uncomfortable, and their nests!--'Oh, Saladin! come
away from the hedge! Don't you see that what puzzles you and makes
you leap up in the air is a redbreast's nest? Don't you see the
pretty speckled eggs? Don't you hear the poor hen calling as it
were for help? Come here this moment, sir!' And by good luck
Saladin (who for a paynim has tolerable qualities) comes, before he
has touched the nest, or before his playmate the brindle, the less
manageable of the two, has espied it.