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. It taught me something of the terrors
of war that day's wandering towards Taunton. I realized all the
men of these parts had wandered away after the Duke, for the sake
of the excitement, after living lonely up there in the wilds.
Their wives had followed the army also. The while population
(scanty as it was) had moved off to look for something more
stirring than had hitherto come to them. I wandered on slowly,
taking my time, getting my direction fairly clear from the
glimpses which I sometimes caught of the line of the highway. At
a little after noon I ate the last of my victuals near a spring.
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