This was sliding down the steep down just behind the house, on a short piece of broad plank with a ridge in front. The way is to lie down with the chest on the plank head first, trailing the toes behind, legs extended as rudders to keep the course straight. A push with the feet starts the board, and the pace increasing, you presently travel at a furious velocity. Nothing can be nicer. They worked at it for hours. The old gentleman came out into the garden and watched them, no doubt remembering when he used to do it himself; but as for the performers, all they thought about him was that they would like to squail a stick at his high and ancient hat aslant on his head.
Presently they rambled into a nut copse over the hill. The nuts were not ripe, and there was nothing much to be done there, but it was a copse, and copses are always pleasant to search about in. Mark returned to the sliding, Bevis sat down on the summit, and at first looked on, but after a while he became lost in his dreamy mood.
Far away the blue-tinted valley went out to the horizon, and the sun was suspended over it like a lamp hung from the ceiling, as it seemed no higher than the hill on which he sat. Underneath was the house, and round the tiled gables the swallows were busy going to and fro their nests. The dovecot and the great barn, the red apples in the orchard, the mill-pool and the grey mill, he could almost put his hand out on them.
Beyond these came the meads, and then the trees closed together like troops at the bugle call, making a limitless forest, and in this was a narrow bright gleam, like a crooked reaping-hook thrown down. It was the New Sea. After which there was no definition, surface only, fainter and fainter to the place where the white clouds went through the door of distance and disappeared. He did not see these, and only just knew that the wheat at his back rustled as the light wind came over. It was the vast aerial space, and the golden circle of the sun. He did not think, he felt, and listened to it.
Mark shouted presently that Jack was coming home; so he ran down, and they went to meet him. Jack put up the target after tea. It was a square of rusty sheet-iron, on which he drew a circle with chalk six inches in diameter, and outside that another about two feet. This he placed against the steep hill--the very best of butts--keeping it upright with two stakes, which he drove in the sward. He measured a hundred yards by stepping, and put three flints in a row to mark the spot. The rifle was loaded and the bullet rammed home with the iron ramrod, which had a round smooth handle at the end, so that you might force the lead into the grooves.