At last, getting desperate at this espionage and thinking besides
I could make a shorter cut towards Castle Fyles, I clambered over
an easy place in the left-hand wall and dropped into the shade of
a magnificent park. Here, at least, whatever the risk of an
outraged law (which I had been patronisingly told was even
stricter than that of the Medes and Persians), I seemed free to
wander unseen and undetected, and accordingly struck a course
under the oaks that promised in time to bring me out somewhere
near the sea.
Dipping into a little dell, where in the perfection of its English
woodland one might have thought to meet Robin Hood himself, or
startle Little John beside a fallen deer, I looked carefully
about, got out my pale crackers, and wondered whether I dared
begin. It is always an eerie sensation to be alone in the forest,
what with the whispering leaves overhead, the stir and hum of
insects, the rustle of ghostly foot-falls, and (in my case) the
uneasy sense of green-liveried keepers sneaking up at one through
the clumps of gorse. However, I was not the man to belie the blood
of Revolutionary heroes and meanly carry my unexploded crackers
beyond the scene of danger, so I remembered the brave days of old
and touched a whitey off. It burst with the roar of a cannon and
reverberated through the glades like the broadside of a man-of-
war. It took me a good five minutes before I had the courage to
detonate another, which, for better security, I did this time
under my hat.
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