"Come along, Nell!" Down the tempting incline he at once raced, with Nellie and Rover at his heels; and, diving beneath a jungle of blackberry-bushes at the bottom, matted together with ropes of ivy that had fallen from a withered oak, whose dry and sapless gnarled old trunk still stood proudly erect in the midst of the mass of luxuriant vegetation with which it was surrounded, Nellie heard him after a bit call out from the leafy enclosure in which he had quickly found himself--"Oh, I say, I see such a pretty fern!" There was silence then for a moment or so, as if Bob was trying to secure the object that had taken his fancy, the quietude being broken by his giving vent to a prolonged "O-o-oh!" "What's the matter ?" cried Nellie, who had stopped without the briary tangle into which her brother had plunged, noticing that his accents of delight suddenly changed to those of pain.

"Are you hurt ?" "I've scratched my face," he said ruefully, emerging from the blackberry-brake with streaks of blood across his forehead and his nose looking as if it had been in the wars.

"Some beastly thorns did it." "Oh!" ejaculated Nellie, in sympathy and surprise; "I'm so sorry!" "It is `oh,' and it hurts too!" retorted he, dabbing his face tenderly with his pocket-handkerchief.

"However, I shall get that fern I was after, though, in spite of all the prickles and thorns in the world!" So saying, in he dashed again, stooping under the thorny network, and came out ere long with a beautiful specimen of the shuttlecock fern, which elicited as expressive an "Oh" from Nellie as the sight of his scratched face had just previously done--an "Oh" of admiration and delight.

But, as with Bob, her joyful exclamation was quickly followed by an expression of woe.
As she stepped forward to inspect the fern more closely, she put her foot on a rotten branch of the oak-tree, which had become broken off from its parent stem and lay stretched across the dell, forming a sort of frail bridge over the prickly chasm below up to the higher ground on which she stood.
Alas! the decayed wood gave way under her weight, slight as that was, and Nellie, uttering a wild shriek of terror, disappeared from Bob's astonished gaze..