“Yowp, yow; wow-wow!” The yelling of Pan woke Bevis, who jumped up, and seeing the bailiff beating the spaniel with a stick, instantly, and without staying the tenth of a second to rub his eyes or stretch himself, rushed at the man and hit him with his doubled fists.  As if he had seen it in his sleep, Bevis understood what was taking place immediately his eyelids opened.  So the bailiff beat the dog, and Bevis beat the bailiff.  The noise made quite an echo against the thick hedges and a high bank that was near.  When the bailiff thought he had thrashed Pan sufficiently, he turned round and looked down at Bevis, whose face was red, and his knuckles sore with striking the bailiff’s hard coat.

“How fess you be, measter,” said the bailiff (meaning fierce), “you mind as you don’t hurt yourself.  Look’ee here, there’ve bin a fine falarie about you, zur.”  He meant that there had been much excitement when it was found that Bevis was not in the garden, and was nowhere to be found.  Everybody was set to hunt for him.

First they thought of the brook, lest he should have walked in among the flags that were coming up so green and strong.  Then they thought of the tallet over the stable, — perhaps he had climbed up there again from the manger, over the heads of the great cart-horses, quietly eating their hay, while he put his foot on the manger and then on the projecting steps in the corner, and into the hayrack — and so up.  He had done it once before, and could not get down, and so the tallet was searched.  One man was sent to the Long Pond, with orders to look everywhere, and borrow the punt and push in among the bulrushes.

Another was despatched to the Close, to gruffly inquire where the cottage boys were, and what they had been doing, for Bevis was known to hanker after their company, to go catching loach under the stones in the stream that crossed the road, and creeping under the arch of the bridge, and taking the moor-hens’ eggs from the banks of the ponds where the rushes were thick.  Another was put on the pony, to gallop up the road after the carter and his waggon, for he had set off that morning with a load of hay for the hills that could be seen to the southward.

Running over every possible thing that Bevis could have done in his mind, his papa remembered that he had lately taken to asking about the road, and would not be satisfied till they had taken him up to the sign-post — a mile beyond the village, and explained the meaning of it.  Some one had told him that it was the road to Southampton — the place where the ships came.  Now, Bevis was full of the ships, drawing them on the blue wall of the summer-house, and floating a boat on the trough in the cow-yard, and looking wistfully up the broad dusty highway, as if he could see the masts and yards sixty miles away or more.  Perhaps when the carter went with the waggon that way, Bevis had slipped up the footpath that made a short cut across the fields, and joined the waggon at the cross-roads, that he might ride to the hills thinking to see the sea on the other side.

And the bailiff, not to be behindhand, having just come in for his lunch, ran out again without so much as wetting his stubbly white beard in the froth of the drawn quart of ale, and made away as fast as his stiff legs could carry him to where there was a steam ploughing engine at work — a mile distant.  The sight of the white steam, and the humming of the fly-wheel, always set Bevis “on the jig,” as the village folk called it, to get to the machinery, and the smell of the cotton waste and oil wafted on the wind was to him like the scent of battle to the war-horse.

But Bevis was not in the tallet, nor the brook, nor among the bulrushes of the Long Pond, nor under the bridge dabbling for loach, nor watching the steam plough, and the cottage boys swore their hardest (and they knew how to swear quite properly) that they had not seen him that morning.  But they would look for him, and forthwith eagerly started to scour the fields and hedges.  Meantime, Bevis, quite happy, was sleeping under the oak in the shadow, with Pan every now and then coming out of the rabbit-hole to snort out the sand that got into his nostrils.

But, by-and-by, when everything had been done and everybody was scattered over the earth seeking for him, the bailiff came back from the steam plough, weary with running, and hungry, thirsty, and cross.  As he passed through the yard he caught a glimpse of Pan’s kennel, which was a tub by the wood pile, and saw that the chain was lying stretched to its full length.  Pan was gone.  At first the bailiff thought Bevis had loosed him, and that he had got a clue.  But when he came near, he saw that the collar was not unbuckled; Pan had worked his head out, and so escaped.

The bailiff turned the collar over thoughtfully with his foot, and felt his scanty white beard with his hard hand; and then he went back to the cart-house.  Up in the cart-house, on the ledge of the wall beneath the thatch, there were three or four sticks, each about four feet long and as thick as your thumb, with the bark on — some were ground ash, some crab-tree, and one was hazel.  This one was straight and as hard as could be.  These sticks were put there for the time when the cows were moved, so that the men might find their sticks quick.  Each had his stick, and the bailiff’s was the hazel one.  With the staff in his hand the bailiff set out straight across the grass, looking neither to the right nor the left, but walking deliberately and without hesitation.

He got through a gap in one hedge, and then he turned to the corner making towards the rabbit-burrows, for he guessed that Pan had gone there.  As he approached he saw Bevis sleeping, and smiled, for looking for the dog he had found the boy.  But first stepping softly up to Bevis, and seeing that he was quite right and unhurt, only asleep, the bailiff went to the hedge and thrust his staff into the hole where Pan was at work.

Out came Pan, and instantly down came the rod.  Pan cowered in the grass; he was all over sand, which flew up in a cloud as the rod struck him again.  “Yowp! — yow — wow — wow!” and this row awoke Bevis.

Bevis battled hard for his dog, but the bailiff had had his lunch delayed, and his peace of mind upset about the boy, and he was resolutely relieving himself upon the spaniel.  Now the hazel rod, being dry and stiff, was like a bar of iron, and did not yield or bend in the least, but made the spaniel’s ribs rattle.  Pan could not get low enough into the grass; he ceased to howl, so great was the pain, but merely whimpered, and the tears filled his brown eyes.  At last the bailiff ceased, and immediately Bevis pulled out his handkerchief, and sat down on the grass and wiped away the spaniel’s tears.

“Now, measter, you come along wi’ I,” said the bailiff, taking his hand.  Bevis would not come, saying he hated him.  But when the bailiff told him about the hunt there had been, and how the people were everywhere looking for him, Bevis began to laugh, thinking it was rare fun.

“Take me ‘pick-a-back,’” said he.

So the bailiff stooped and took him.  “Gee-up!” said Bevis, punching his broad back and kicking him to go faster.  Pan, now quite forgotten, crept along behind them.

Bevis listened to the lecture they gave him at home with a very bad grace.  He sulked and pouted, as if he had himself been the injured party.  But no sooner was he released from the dinner-table, than he was down on his knees at his own particular corner cupboard, the one that had been set apart for his toys and things ever since he could walk.  It was but a small cupboard, made across the angle of two walls, and with one shelf only, yet it was bottomless, and always contained something new.

There were the last fragments of the great box of wooden bricks, cut and chipped, and notched and splintered by that treasure, his pocket-knife.  There was the tin box for the paste, or the worms in moss, when he went fishing.  There was the wheel of his old wheelbarrow, long since smashed and numbered with the Noah’s arks that have gone the usual way.  There was the brazen cylinder of a miniature steam-engine bent out of all shape.  There was the hammer-head made specially for him by the blacksmith down in the village, without a handle, for people were tired of putting new handles to it, he broke them so quickly.  There was a horse-shoe, and the iron catch of a gate, and besides these a boxwood top, which he could not spin, but which he had payed away half the savings in his money-box for, because he had seen it split the other boys’ tops in the road.

In one corner was a brass cannon, the touch-hole blackened by the explosion of gunpowder, and by it the lock of an ancient pistol — the lock only, and neither barrel nor handle.  An old hunting-crop, some feathers from pheasants’ tails, part of a mole-trap, an old brazen bugle, much battered, a wooden fig-box full of rusty nails, several scraps of deal board and stumps of cedar pencil were heaped together in confusion.  But these were not all, nor could any written inventory exhaust the contents, and give a perfect list of all that cupboard held.  There was always something new in it:  Bevis never went there, but he found something.

With the hunting-crop he followed the harriers and chased the doubling hare; with the cannon he fought battles, such as he saw in the pictures; the bugle, too, sounded the charge (the bailiff sometimes blew it in the garden to please him, and the hollow “who-oo!” it made echoed over the fields); with the deal boards and the rusty nails, and the hammer-head, he built houses, and even cities.  The jagged and splintered wooden bricks, six inches long, were not bricks, but great beams and baulks of timber; the wheel of the wheelbarrow was the centre of many curious pieces of mechanism.  He could see these things easily.  So he sat down at his cupboard and forgot the lecture instantly; the pout disappeared from his lips as he plunged his hand into the inexhaustible cupboard.

“Bevis, dear,” he heard presently, “you may have an apple.”

Instantly, and without staying to shut the door on his treasures, he darted upstairs — up two flights, with a clatter and a bang, burst open the door, and was in the apple-room.  It was a large garret or attic, running half the length of the house, and there, in the autumn, the best apples from the orchard were carried, and put on a thin layer of hay, each apple apart from its fellow (for they ought not to touch), and each particular sort, the Blenheim Oranges and the King Pippins, the Creepers and the Grindstone Pippins (which grew nowhere else), divided from the next sort by a little fence of hay.

The most of them were gone now, only a few of the keeping apples remained, and from these Bevis, with great deliberation, chose the biggest, measuring them by the eye and weighing them in his hand.  Then downstairs again with a clatter and a bang, down the second stairs this time, past the gun-room, where the tools were kept, and a carpenter’s bench; then through the whole length of the ground floor from the kitchen to the parlour slamming every door behind him, and kicking over the chairs in front of him.

There he stayed half-a-minute to look at the hornet’s nest under the glass-case on the mantelpiece.  The comb was built round a central pillar or column, three stories one above the other, and it had been taken from the willow tree by the brook, the huge hollow willow which he had twice tried to chop down, that he might make a boat of it.  Then out of doors, and up the yard, and past the cart-house, when something moved in the long grass under the wall.  It was a weasel, caught in a gin.

The trap had been set by the side of a drain for rats, and the weasel coming out, or perhaps frightened by footsteps, and hastening carelessly, had been trapped.  Bevis, biting his apple, looked at the weasel, and the weasel said:  “Sir Bevis, please let me out, this gin hurts me so; the teeth are very sharp and the spring is very strong, and the tar-cord is very stout, so that I cannot break it.  See how the iron has skinned my leg and taken off the fur, and I am in such pain.  Do please let me go, before the ploughboy comes, or he will hit me with a stick, or smash me with a stone, or put his iron-shod heel on me; and I have been a very good weasel, Bevis.  I have been catching the horrid rats that eat the barley-meal put for the pigs.  Oh, let me out, the gin hurts me so!”

Bevis put his foot on the spring, and was pressing it down, and the weasel thought he was already free, and looked across at the wood pile under which he meant to hide, when Bevis heard a little squeak close to his head, and looked up and saw a mouse under the eaves of the cart-house, peeping forth from a tiny crevice, where the mortar had fallen from between the stones of the wall.

“Bevis, Bevis!” said the mouse, “don’t you do it — don’t you let that weasel go!  He is a most dreadful wicked weasel, and his teeth are ever so much sharper than that gin.  He does not kill the rats, because he is afraid of them (unless he can assassinate one in his sleep), but he murdered my wife and sucked her blood, and her body, all dry and withered, is up in the beam there, if you will get a ladder and look.  And he killed all my little mouses, and made me very unhappy, and I shall never be able to get another wife to live with me in this cart-house while he is about.  There is no way we can get away from him.  If we go out into the field he follows us there, and if we go into the sheds he comes after us there, and he is a cruel beast, that wicked weasel.  You know you ate the partridge’s eggs,” added the mouse, speaking to the weasel.

“It is all false,” said the weasel.  “But it is true that you ate the wheat out of the ears in the wheat-rick, and you know what was the consequence.  If that little bit of wheat you ate had been thrashed, and ground, and baked, and made into bread, then that poor girl would have had a crust to eat, and would not have jumped into the river, and she would have had a son, and he would have been a great man and fought battles, just as Bevis does with his brazen cannon, and won great victories, and been the pride of all the nation.  But you ate those particular grains of wheat that were meant to do all this, you wicked little mouse.  Besides which, you ran across the bed one night, and frightened Bevis’s mother.”

“But I did not mean to,” said the mouse; “and you did mean to kill my wife, and you ate the partridge’s eggs.”

“And a very good thing I did,” said the weasel.  “Do you know what would have happened, if I had not taken them?  I did it all for good, and with the best intentions.  For if I had left the eggs one more day, there was a man who meant to have stolen them all but one, which he meant to have left to deceive the keeper.  If he had stolen them, he would have been caught, for the keeper was watching for him all the time, and he would have been put to prison, and his children would have been hungry.  So I ate the eggs, and especially I ate every bit of the one the man meant to have left.”

“And why were you so particular about eating that egg?” asked Bevis.

“Because,” said the weasel, “if that egg had come to a partridge chick, and the chick had lived till the shooting-time came, then the sportsman and his brother, when they came round, would have started it out of the stubble, and the shot from the gun of the younger would have accidentally killed the elder, and people would have thought it was done to murder him for the sake of the inheritance.”

“Now, is this true?” said Bevis.

“Yes, that it is; and I killed the mouse’s wife also for the best of reasons.”

“You horrid wretch!” cried the mouse.

“Oh, you needn’t call me a wretch,” said the weasel; “I am sure you ought to be grateful to me, for your wife was very jealous because you paid so much attention to the Miss Mouse you want to marry now, and in the night she meant to have gnawn your throat.”

“And you frightened my mother,” said Bevis, “by running across her bed in the night;” and he began to press on the spring of the gin.

“Yes, that he did,” said the weasel, overjoyed; “and he made a hole in the boards of the floor, and it was down that hole that the half-sovereign rolled and was lost, and the poor maid-servant sent away because they thought she had stolen it.”

“What do you say to that?” asked Bevis.

But the mouse was quite aghast and dumb-founded and began to think that it was he after all who was in the wrong, so that for the moment he could not speak.  Just then Bevis caught sight of the colt that had come up beside his mother, the cart mare, to the fence; and thinking that he would go and try and stroke the pretty creature, Bevis started forward, forgetting all about the weasel and the mouse.  As he started, he pressed the spring down, and in an instant the weasel was out, and had hobbled across to the wood pile.  When the mouse saw this, he gave a little squeak of terror, and ran back to his hiding-place.

But when Bevis put out his hand to stroke the colt, the colt started back, so he picked up a stick and threw it at him.  Then he took another stick and hunted the hens round and round the ricks to make them lay their eggs faster, as it is well known that is the best way.  For he remembered that last year they had shown him three tiny bantam chicks, such darling little things, all cuddled cosily together in the hollow of a silver table-spoon.  The hens clucked and raced, and Bevis raced after and shouted, and the cock, slipping on one side, for it hurt his dignity to run away like the rest, hopped upon the railings, napped his wings, crew, and cried:  “You’ll be glad when I’m dead”.  That was how Bevis translated his “hurra-ca-roorah”.

In the midst of the noise out came Polly, the dairy-maid, with a bone for Pan, which Bevis no sooner saw, than he asked her to let him give Pan his dinner.  “Very well, dear,” said Polly, and went in to finish her work.  So Bevis took the bone, and Pan, all weary and sore from his thrashing, crept out from his tub to receive it; but Bevis put the bone on the grass (all the grass was worn bare where Pan could reach) just where the spaniel could smell it nicely but could not get it.  Pan struggled, and scratched, and howled, and scratched again, and tugged till his collar, buckled tightly now, choked him, and he gasped and panted, while Bevis, taking the remnant of his apple from his pocket, nibbled it and laughed with a face like an angel’s for sweetness.

Then a rook went over and cawed, and Bevis, looking up at the bird, caught a glimpse of the swing over the wall — it stood under the sycamore tree.  Dropping the bit of apple, away he ran to the swing, and sat in it, and pushed himself off.  As he swung forward he straightened his legs and leant back; when he swung back he drew his feet under him and leant forward, and by continuing this the weight of his body caused the swing to rise like a pendulum till he went up among the sycamore boughs, nearly as high as the ivy-grown roof of the summer-house, just opposite.  There he went to and fro, as easily as possible, shutting his eyes and humming to himself.

Presently a cock chaffinch came and perched in the ash close by, and immediately began to sing his war-song:  “I am lord of this tree,” sang the chaffinch, “I am lord of this tree; every bough is mine, and every leaf, and the wind that comes through it, and the sunshine that falls on it, and the rain that moistens it, and the blue sky over it, and the grass underneath it — all this is mine.  My nest is going to be made in the ivy that grows half-way up the trunk, and my wife is very busy to-day bringing home the fibres and the moss, and I have just come back a little while to tell you all that none of you must come into or touch my tree.  I like this tree, and therefore it is mine.  Be careful that none of you come inside the shadow of it, or I shall peck you with all my might.”

Then he paused awhile, and Bevis went on swinging and listening.  In a minute or two another chaffinch came to the elm in the hedge just outside the garden, and quite close to the ash.  Directly he perched, he ruffled up and began to sing too:  “I am lord of this tree, and it is a very high tree, much higher than the ash, and even above the oak where that slow fellow the crow is building.  Mine is the very highest tree of all, and I am the brightest and prettiest of all the chaffinches.  See my colours how bright they are, so that you would hardly know me from a bullfinch.  There is not a feather rumpled in my wing, or my tail, and I have the most beautiful eyes of all of you.”

Hardly had he done singing than another chaffinch came into the crab-tree, a short way up the hedge, and he began to sing too:  “I have a much bigger tree than either of you, but as it is at the top of the field I cannot bring it down here, but I have come down into this crab-tree, and I say it is mine, and I am lord of two trees.  I am stronger than both of you, and neither of you dare come near me.”

The two other chaffinches were silent for a minute, and then one of them, the knight of the ash-tree, flew down into the hedge under the crab-tree; and instantly down flew the third chaffinch, and they fought a battle, and pecked and buffeted one another with their wings, till Bevis’s tears ran down with laughing.  Presently they parted, and the third chaffinch went home to his tree at the top of the field, leaving one little feather on the ground, which the first chaffinch picked up and carried to his nest in the ash.

But scarcely had he woven it into the nest than down flew the second chaffinch from the elm into the shadow of the ash.  Flutter, flutter went the first chaffinch to meet him, and they had such a battle as Bevis had never seen before, and fought till they were tired; then each flew up into his tree, and sang again about their valour.

Immediately afterwards ten sparrows came from the house-top into the bushes, chattering and struggling all together, scratching, pecking, buffeting, and all talking at once.  After they had had a good fight they all went back to the house-top, and began to tell each other what tremendous blows they had given.  Then there was such a great cawing from the rook trees, which were a long way off, that it was evident a battle was going on there, and Bevis heard the chaffinch say that one of the rooks had been caught stealing his cousin’s sticks.

Next two goldfinches began to fight, and then a blackbird came up from the brook and perched on a rail, and he was such a boaster, for he said he had the yellowest bill of all the blackbirds, and the blackest coat, and the largest eye, and the sweetest whistle, and he was lord over all the blackbirds.  In two minutes up came another one from out of the bramble bushes at the corner, and away they went chattering at each other.  Presently the starlings on the chimney began to quarrel, and had a terrible set-to.  Then a wren came by, and though he was so small, his boast was worse than the blackbird’s, for he said he was the sharpest and the cleverest of all the birds, and knew more than all put together.

Afar off, in the trees, there were six or seven thrushes, all declaring that they were the best singers, and had the most speckled necks; and up in the sky the swallows were saying that they had the whitest bosoms.

“Oo! whoo,” cried a wood-pigeon from the very oak under which Bevis had gone to sleep.  “There are none who can fly so fast as I can.  I am a captain of the wood-pigeons, and in the winter I have three hundred and twenty-two pigeons under me, and they all do exactly as I tell them.  They fly when I fly, and settle down when I settle down.  If I go to the west, they go to the west; and if I go to the east, then they follow to the east.  I have the biggest acorns, and the best of the peas, for they leave them especially for me.  And not one of all the three hundred and twenty-two pigeons dares to begin to eat the wheat in August till I say it is ripe and they may, and not one of them dares to take a wife till I say yes.  Oo-whoo!  Is not my voice sweet and soft, and delicious, far sweeter than that screeching nightingale’s in the hawthorn yonder?”

But he had no sooner finished than another one began in the fir copse, and said he was captain of one thousand pigeons, and was ever so much stronger, and could fly ten miles an hour faster.  So away went the first pigeon to the fir copse, and there was a great clattering of wings and “oo-whoo"-ing, and how it was settled Bevis could not tell.

So as he went on swinging, he heard all the birds quarrelling, and boasting, and fighting, hundreds of them all around, and he said to the chaffinch on the ash: —

“Chaffinch, it seems to me that you are all very wicked birds, for you think of nothing but fighting all day long”.

The chaffinch laughed, and said:  “My dear Sir Bevis, I do not know what you mean by wicked.  But fighting is very nice indeed, and we all feel so jolly when fighting time comes.  For you must know that the spring is the duelling time, when all the birds go to battle.  There is not a tree nor a bush on your papa’s farm, nor on all the farms all around, nor in all the country, nor in all this island, but some fighting is going on.  I have not time to tell you all about it; but I wish you could read our history, and all about the wars that have been going on these thousand years.  Perhaps if you should ever meet the squirrel he will tell you, for he knows most about history.  As we all like it so much, it must be right, and we never hurt one another very much.  Sometimes a feather is knocked out, and sometimes one gets a hard peck; but it does not do any harm.  And after it is over, in the autumn, we are all very good friends, and go hunting together.  You may see us, hundreds of us in your papa’s stubble-fields, Bevis, all flying together very happy.  I think the skylarks fight the most, for they begin almost in the winter if the sun shines warm for an hour, and they keep on all day in the summer, and till it is quite dark and the stars are out, besides getting up before the cuckoo to go on again.  Yet they are the sweetest and nicest of all the birds, and the most gentle, and do not mind our coming into their fields.  So I am sure, Bevis, that you are wrong, and fighting is not wicked if you love one another.  You and Mark are fond of one another, but you hit him sometimes, don’t you?”

“Yes, that I do,” said Bevis, very eagerly, “I hit him yesterday so hard with my bat that he would not come and play with me.  It is very nice to hit any one.”

“But you cannot do it like we do it,” said the chaffinch, swelling with pride again, “for we sing and you can’t, and if you can’t sing you have no business to fight, and besides, though you are much older than me you are not married yet.  Now I have such a beautiful wife, and to tell you the truth, Bevis, we do the fighting because the ladies love to see it, and kiss us for it afterwards.  I am the knight of this tree!”

After which Bevis, being tired of swinging, went to the summer-house to read what he had written with his stump of pencil till he was called to tea.  In the evening, when the sun was sinking, he went out and lay down on the seat — it was a broad plank, grey with lichen — under the russet apple-tree, looking towards the west, over the brook below.  He saw the bees coming home to the hives close by on the haha, and they seemed to come high in the air, flying straight as if from the distant hills where the sun was.  He heard the bees say that there were such quantities of flowers on the hills, and such pleasant places, and that the sky was much more blue up there, and he thought if he could he would go to the hills soon.