is pace
until he was out of harm's reach. He took the first road that offered,
and soon put the village behind him. He hurried along, as briskly as he
could, during several hours, keeping a nervous watch over his shoulder
for pursuit; but his fears left him at last, and a grateful sense of
security took their place. He recognised, now, that he was hungry, and
also very tired. So he halted at a farmhouse; but when he was about to
speak, he was cut short and driven rudely away. His clothes were against
him.

He wandered on, wounded and indignant, and was resolved to put himself in
the way of like treatment no more. But hunger is pride's master; so, as
the evening drew near, he made an attempt at another farmhouse; but here
he fared worse than before; for he was called hard names and was promised
arrest as a vagrant except he moved on promptly.

The night came on, chilly and overcast; and still the footsore monarch
laboured slowly on. He was obliged to keep moving, for every time he sat
down to rest he was soon penetrated to the bone with the cold. All his
sensations and experiences, as he moved through the solemn gloom and the
empty vastness of the night, were new and strange to him. At intervals
he heard voices approach, pass by, and fade into silence; and as he saw
nothing more of the bodies they belonged to than a sort of formless
drifting blur, there was something spectral and uncanny about it all that
made him shudder. Occasionally he caught the twinkle of a light--always
far away, apparently--almost in another world; if he heard the tinkle of
a sheep's bell, it was vague, distant, indistinct; the muffled lowing of
the herds floated to him on the night wind in vanishing cadences, a
mournful sound; now and then came the complaining howl of a dog over
viewless expanses of field and forest; all sounds were remote; they made
the little King feel that all life and activity were far removed from
him, and that he stood solitary, companionless, in the centre of a
measureless solitude.

He stumbled along, through the gruesome fascinations of this new
experience, startled occasionally by the soft rustling of the dry leaves
overhead, so like human whispers they seemed to sound; and by-and-by he
came suddenly upon the freckled light of a tin lantern near at hand. He
stepped back into the shadows and waited. The lantern stood by the open
door of a barn. The King waited some time--there was no sound, and
nobody sti