Then, picking myself slowly up, I
performed the maddest capers, and, finally sobering down, continued my
course. Every now and again fancying I detected the stealthy footsteps
of a keeper, I hid behind a tree, where I remained till I was quite
assured I had been mistaken, and that no one was about. How long I
dallied I do not know, but it must have been fully one o'clock before
I arrived at the outskirts of the avenue, and, advancing eagerly,
ensconced myself in my favourite sanctuary, the hollow oak. All was
hushed and motionless, and, as I gazed into the gloom, I became
conscious, for the first time in my life, of a sensation of eeriness.
The arched canopy of foliage overhead was strongly suggestive of a
funeral pall; not a glimmer of moonlight penetrated through it; and
all beneath seemed to me to be buried in the silence and blackness of
the grave.
The loneliness got on my nerves; at first I grew afraid, only afraid,
and then my fears turned into a panic, a wild, mad panic, consisting
in the one desire to get where there were human beings--creatures I
knew and understood. With this end in view I emerged from my retreat,
and was preparing to fly through the wood, when, from afar off, there
suddenly came the sound of a voice, the harsh, grating voice of a man.
Convinced this time that I had been discovered by a keeper, I jumped
back into the tree, and, swarming up the inside of the trunk, peeped
cautiously out. What I saw nearly made me jump out of my skin.
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