"Thy wife will soon, if she hath not already."

"Thou wilt 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