He decided on Wales, and began to take stock of his possessions, counting the change that remained in his trouser pocket—seven and ninepence ha’penny in all—and untying the bundle into which he had put a change of socks and underwear. He wished, now that he came to think of it, that he had changed into his working clothes, for it did not seem right to him to look for work in his Sunday best. He turned out the pockets of the coat, wondering what tokens of his past life it would disclose. In the breast pocket, to his great surprise, he found a small packet of paper that he couldn’t account for. He opened it, and found that it contained two sovereigns. He stared at them incredulously and laughed aloud. Alice must have slipped them in when she said good-bye to him. He felt suddenly tender toward her, and immensely pleased at this striking turn in his fortunes. He scraped out of his side pocket some dry remnants of tobacco, filled his pipe, tied up his bundle, whistled to Tiger and set off down hill leaving the brow of the Uffdown between him and the blackness of Mawne. It was all new ground to him. The hills that he was leaving behind formed a lip of the saucer in which the midland coal measures lay, and their line had always marked the limit of Abner’s curiosity as boldly as they defined his physical horizon. Now he was passing quickly to the unknown plain. The path grew rough and precipitous. For a hundred yards it cut into a plantation of larches fully grown. His feet and Tiger’s made no sound on the drift of needles. The wood was dry, warm, fragrant, and as quiet as a church. One would have thought that no living creature was there, till Tiger scented a squirrel, and Abner heard above him the thin alarm note of the wood-wren. From the wood they crossed a stone stile into a sunless lane, steeper even than the path across the hill, grass-grown for want of traffic and now possessed by a company of solemn foxgloves. This lane, though unfrequented, was the favourite picnic-place of Mr Willis of Mawne Hall, who always called it ‘our little Switzerland.’ The only thing that struck Abner about it was its steepness. A stone that he dislodged in his walking bounded on as though it were falling over the roof of a house, and Tiger scuttled after it full-pelt. Abner also found that it was easier to run than to walk.