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Just behind the sloe-bush, under a fringe of immense ferns, was an opening in the earth, about eighteen inches high, by two feet across. It was like a large rabbit or fox earth, except that the mouth of it was not worn bare. I did not like the thought of going down th' 'ole; but with this great griping fist on my nape there was not much sense in saying so.

When he loosed his hold, his great hand pawed over my throat till he had me by the scruff of the neck. He drew me over towards the spring, as one would draw a puppy. Then, still crouching in the fern, he hurried me to a single stunted sloe-bush which grew there. "Go down, you," he said, giving me a shove towards the bush. "Down th' 'ole."

"Oh no; I'm not tired," he said. "Isn't it lovely coming out, don't you think? I saw a sloe-bush in blossom and a lot of celandines. I'm glad it's sunny." "Can I give you anything to eat or to drink?" "No, thank you." "How's your mother?" "I think she's tired now. I think she's had too much to do. Perhaps in a little while she'll go to Skegness with me. Then she'll be able to rest.

So Samuel took a look over to see that all was quiet, and there, in the midst, he marked a big girl struggling with a sloe-bush! But, quick though he was, she'd seen him first, and before he could call out and order her back to the road and take her name, she cried out to him: "Will 'e lend me a hand, Mister Policeman, if you please? I be catched in thicky sloan tree."

The hedgehog shut the house-door behind him, and took the path to the field. He had not gone very far from home, and was just turning round the sloe-bush which stands there outside the field, to go up into the turnip-field, when he observed the hare who had gone out on business of the same kind, namely, to visit his cabbages.

I believe that he would have fretted his heart out much sooner than he did if it had not been for Ody, his only remaining son, "whose aquils," his aunt Moggy sometimes remarked rather bitterly, "he consaited you wouldn't find plintier in the world than an apple sittin' on a sloe-bush."

And so as I lay squatted there beneath a sloe-bush, and the tones of a voice grating as those of the corncrake came to me through the chinks in the wall, I knew that Weems was at large once more, and pressing on with his errand. I might have expected him, and yet his arrival was a bit of a surprise; and on the spur of the moment I could not for the life of me think what was best to do.

We love to sit under a blossoming sloe-bush and see the silver pools glistening here and there in the turf cuttings, and watch the transparent vapour rising from the red-brown of the purple-shadowed bog fields. Dinnis Rooney, half awake, leisurely, silent, is moving among the stacks with his creel.