Here I picked up the horse-track easily enough, and without stopping, save for a short breathing space, hurried along it, to gain the shelter of the trees. So far so good! I had reason to be thankful. But my case was still an indifferent one. More than once in getting out of the town I had slipped and fallen. I was wet through, and plastered with dirt owing to these mishaps; and my clothes were in a woeful plight. For a time excitement kept me up, however, and I made good way, warmed by the thought that I had again baffled the great Bishop. It was only when the day had come, and grown on to noon, and I saw no sign of any pursuers, that thought got the upper hand. Then I began to compare, with some bitterness of feeling, my present condition--wet, dirty, and homeless--with that which I had enjoyed only a week before; and it needed all my courage to support me. Skulking, half famished, between Barnet and Tottenham, often compelled to crouch in ditches or behind walls while travelers went by, and liable each instant to have to leave the highway and take to my heels, I had leisure to feel; and I did feel, more keenly, I think, that afternoon than at any later time, the bitterness of fortune. I cursed Stephen Gardiner a dozen times, and dared not let my thoughts wander to my father. I had said that I would build my house afresh. Well, truly I was building it from the foundation. It added very much to my misery that it rained all day a cold, half-frozen rain. The whole afternoon I spent in hiding, shivering and shaking in a hole under a ledge near Tottenham; being afraid to go into London before nightfall, lest I should be waited for at the gate and be captured. Chilled and bedraggled as I was, and weak through want of food which I dared not go out to beg, the terrors of capture got hold of my mind and presented to me one by one every horrible form of humiliation, the stocks, the pillory, the cart-tail; so that even Master Pritchard, could he have seen me and known my mind, might have pitied me; so that I loathe to this day the hours I spent in that foul hiding-place. Between a man's best and worse, there is little but a platter of food.