Page:Hornung - Fathers of Men.djvu/265

 The nearest meadow was bright emerald after so much rain. The next one had already a glint of gold in the middle distance. But the fields that rose again beyond the dense, dark wood, over a mile away, were neither green nor yellow, but smoky blue.

It was the wood itself, within half that distance, that drew and held the boys' attention. It might have been a patch of dark green lichen in the venerable roof of England, and the further fields its mossy slates.

"It looks about as good a jungle as they make," said Chips. "I should go down and practise finding my way across it, if I was thinking of going out to Australia."

Chips looked round as he spoke. But Jan confined his attention to the wood.

"It'd take you all your time," he answered. "It's more like a bit of overgrown cocoanut matting than anything else."

Chips liked the simile, especially as a sign of liveliness in Jan; but it dodged the subject he was trying to introduce. The fact was that Jan's future was just now a matter of anxiety to himself and his friends. There had long been some talk of his going to Australia, to an uncle who had settled out there, whereas he himself would have given anything to go for a soldier like his other uncle. This was an impracticable dream; but Dudley Relton, consulted on the alternative, had written back to say that in his opinion Australia was the very place for such as Jan. Heriot, on the other hand, had quite other ideas; and Jan was too divided in his own mind, and too sick of the whole question, to wish to discuss it for the hundredth time with such a talker as old Chips.

"Just about room for the foxes," he went on about the covert, "and that's all."