After a little I discovered, a little way off, a couple of boys about nine years of age. They were common village boys, rosy faced and wholesome: they carried a basket, and they were slowly making their way up the stream, stopping now to throw a stone at a squirrel, and now to dam the running water, and now to find a nut or filbert ripe enough to be eaten. By the basket which they carried I knew that they were come in search of whortleberries, for which purpose they would have to get quite to the end of the comb and the top of the hill. Therefore, I stepped out of the wood and asked them whence they came and whither they were going. They told me in plain Somersetshire (the language which I love, and would willingly have written this book in it, but for the unfortunate people who cannot understand it) that they were sent by their parents to get whortleberries, and that they came from the little village of Corfe, two miles down the valley. This was all they had to say, and they stared at me as shyly as if they had never before encountered a stranger. I clearly perceive now that I ought to have engaged them in conversation and drawn them gently down the valley in the direction of their village until we reached the first appearance of a road, when I could have bidden them farewell or sent them up the hill by another comb. But I was so anxious that they should not come up any higher that I committed a great mistake, and warned them against going on. 'Boys,' I said, 'beware! If you go higher up the comb you will certainly meet wild men, who always rob and beat boys;' here they trembled, though they had not a penny in the world. 'Ay, boys! and sometimes have been known to murder them. Turn back--turn back--and come no farther.' The boys were very much frightened, partly at the apparition of a stranger where they expected to find no one, and partly at the news of wild and murderous men in a place where they had never met with anyone at all, unless it might have been a gipsy camp. After gazing at me stupidly for a little while they turned and ran away, as fast as their legs could carry them, down the comb. I watched them running, and when they were out of sight I went back again, still disquieted, because they might return. When I told Barnaby in the evening, he, too, was uneasy. For, he said, the boys would spread abroad the report that there were people in the valley. What people could there be but fugitives? 'Sister,' he said, 'to-morrow morning must we change our quarters. On the other side of the hills looking south, or to the east in Neroche Forest, we may make another camp, and be still more secluded. For to-night I think we are in safety.'