At the half-way little hedge inn, for once in my life I lighted down and called for a bowl of soup, but could only get coffee, and that without milk--which proves the improvidence of these people. For Crewe Moss would easily have pastured a hundred cows, though it would most likely happen that an odd one might get laired in the soft places now and then. But not to have so much as a drop of milk and on Crewe Moss! Lamentable! So I told the people what I thought of them, mounted Dapple, and came my ways. I had gone, perhaps, three miles, and was skirting the woods adjoining the property of Mr. Stennis, when, as I passed under some high trees a noose dropped about my neck. The mare passed on, and I was left dangling as neatly as if the hangman had done it. Happily for me the cord had descended lower than my neck on one side, and I was caught under the left armpit. But there I swung and turned all the same, shouting manfully for help. I could observe as I wheeled about, for all the world like a scarecrow in a bean field, some one in the act of catching Dapple and tying her to a tree. Then the man--a long-limbed, ugly-mugged fellow, with corkscrew curls exactly like the old maids when I was young--came back, and, letting me down, wrapped me carefully in a coil of rope till I could move neither hand nor foot. I know him now to be Mad Jeremy, for long chief agent in the doubtful affairs of Mr. Hobby Stennis. Now I am a fair weight, for my inches, though not to call a heavy man. But this gipsy-looking fellow took me on his back as easily as if I had been a bag of shavings for kindling. If he had taken to honest courses, that same Jeremy Orrin--for so I am informed he is called--I would gladly have given him a thirty-shilling-a-week job in the warehouse. Nothing would have come unhandily to him. Well, he carried me by various passages, the rough stone and lime of which scratched my face, knees, and knocking elbows, to a commodious rounded chamber. It was floored, walled, and roofed with wood. But I could make out, by sounding, the stone arching, and behind that again the solid earth. It was, as I now know, the cellar or ice house of the monks which they had built for themselves on the verge of the Moat to cool their wine in torrid summers. Hither the woman, Aphra Orrin, accompanied her brother, my captor. They searched me thoroughly, as though I were a postman with registered letters and other valuables, but, as was my habit, they found upon my person no store of valuables--fairs and trysts being no fit places to make parade of one's gear. Among some almanacs, jottings of bargains, and other things, these two came on the cheque for three hundred pounds on the bank of Thorsby, at which Mr. Lightbody, the auctioneer, did his business--as they said, for the purpose of giving him a day extra--which, indeed, an honest man might very well do, paying out on many occasions before he had received the price from the buyer.