About six o’clock in the morning, a grey light being then apparent in the eastward heaven above Went Hill, I found John and Humphrey Stirk with their chins resting on their muskets, and their mouths as wide agape as young blackbirds are when the old bird comes home with a worm in her beak. “Ha!” says I. “By your faces, lads, ’tis high time you were relieved. Away with you to the kitchen, and bid Barbara see to food and drink for you while I keep guard. We are ill-mannered, but you shall have an hour’s relief while there’s a chance,” I says, bundling them off, and feeling that it were scurvy behaviour to treat volunteers less considerately. So they thanked me and withdrew, and having been on my legs all night I sat me down near the window and stared at the grey sky outside. “Faith!” says I, yawning, “here’s a pretty state of things that I have come into. Look upon thyself, Dick,” I says, “as a dead man, over whom they have already said ‘Ashes to ashes.’ For thou wilt certainly be shot if thou stayest here, and hanged if thou dost escape. However, there’s no use in repining nor in reflecting. Shot or hanged, what matter a century hence?” And yet, as I sat there, I could not help but reflect, though I can with great honesty say that I did not repine. I think it must have been my liking for philosophic questionings that made me reflect in the fashion I did, for, in sooth, all my thoughts turned to the curious manner in which one small event or trifling circumstance had led to another, until at last I was landed in a very quagmire of serious result. But there I flew away at another tangent, and began to ask myself whether there is any event or action so trifling or unimportant as not to have any effect on our happiness or misery. Certainly the events of the twenty-four hours then drawing to a close had seemed small in themselves, and were yet productive of results the most serious. If my horse had not fallen dead by the wayside I should not have stayed to think under the trees at Barnsdale, and if I had not stayed there I should not have thought of Reuben Trippett’s farmstead and in due course gone there, and if I had not gone there I should never have heard of Anthony Dacre’s plot, and if I had remained in ignorance of that I should certainly not have been sitting in my uncle’s manor-house that morning waiting for daybreak, and feeling myself already a lost man. “Alas!” I sighs, coming at last to a definite opinion, “’tis most true that no event is so trifling as to be wholly unimportant. There is naught so sure as that one thing leads to another--the mischief is that we never know what that other is going to be.”