nine
in the evening
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 .