o'clock, if as much? I wondered if it had been the old carter, who had never really seen me. It might have been the old carter; but doubtless he drummed for a good while on the door of the stable before anybody heard him. Or it might have been one of the garden sentries. One of the sentries might well have peeped in at the window of my room to make sure that I was up to no pranks. He could have seen from the window that my bed was empty. If he had noticed that, he could have unlocked my door to make sure, after which it would not have taken more than a few minutes to start after me. I learned afterwards that the sentry had alarmed the house at a little before five o'clock. The carter, being only half-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.