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. 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. I rested after my dinner, then pushed on again, till I had won to a little spinney only four miles from Taunton, where my legs began to fail under me.