awake
when he came after me, suspected nothing till the other farm-hands came
for the horses, at about six o'clock, when, the key being gone, he had
to break the lock, vowing that the rattens had took his key from him in
the night. My disappearance puzzled everybody, because I had hidden my
tracks so carefully that no one noticed at first how the chimney bars
had been loosened. No one in that house knew of the secret room, so that
the general impression was that I had either squeezed myself through the
window, or blown myself out through the keyhole by art-magic. The hounds
had been laid along the road to Chard, with the result that they had hit
my trail after a few minutes of casting about.

Now that they were after me, I did not know what to do. I dared not
go on towards Taunton; for who knew how soon the squire would find his
error, by viewing the fox? He was too old a huntsman not to cast back
to where he had left the road, as soon as he learned that his hounds
had changed foxes. I concluded that I had better stay where I was,
throughout that day, carefully hidden in the yew-tree. In the evening
I might venture further if the coast seemed clear. It was easy to make
such a resolution; but not so easy to keep to it; for fifteen hours is a
long time for a boy to wait. I stayed quiet for some hours, but I heard
no more of my hunters. I learned later that they had gone from me, in
a wide circuit, to cut round upon the Taunton roads, so as to intercept
me, or to cause me to be intercepted in case I passed by those ways.
The hounds gave up after chasing the fox for three miles. The old squire
thought that they stopped because the sun had destroyed the scent. With
a little help from an animal I had beaten Aurelia once more. When I grew
weary of sitting up in the yew tree, clambered down, intending to push
on through the wood until I came to the end of it. It was mighty
thick cover to push through for the first half mile; then I came to a
cart-track, made by wood-cutters, which I followed till it took me out
of the wood into a wild kind of sheep-pasture. It was now fully nine
in the evening, but the country was so desolate it might have been
undiscovered land. I might have been its first settler, newly come there
from the seas. It taught me something of the terrors of war that day's
wandering towards Taunton. I realized all the men of these parts had
wandered away after the Duke, for the sake of the excitement, after
living