Here he resolved to pass the night.  He chose a part where the trees were thickest, lit his fire, plucked and cleaned four quails, filled his billy with water from the stream hard by, made tea in his pannikin, grilled two of his birds on the embers, ate them, and when he had done all this, he lit his pipe and began to think things over.  “So far so good,” said he to himself; but hardly had the words passed through his mind before he was startled by the sound of voices, still at some distance, but evidently drawing towards him.

He instantly gathered up his billy, pannikin, tea, biscuits, and blanket, all of which he had determined to discard and hide on the following morning; everything that could betray him he carried full haste into the wood some few yards off, in the direction opposite to that from which the voices were coming, but he let his quails lie where they were, and put his pipe and tobacco in his pocket.

The voices drew nearer and nearer, and it was all my father could do to get back and sit down innocently by his fire, before he could hear what was being said.

“Thank goodness,” said one of the speakers (of course in the Erewhonian language), “we seem to be finding somebody at last.  I hope it is not some poacher; we had better be careful.”

“Nonsense!” said the other.  “It must be one of the rangers.  No one would dare to light a fire while poaching on the King’s preserves.  What o’clock do you make it?”

“Half after nine.”  And the watch was still in the speaker’s hand as he emerged from darkness into the glowing light of the fire.  My father glanced at it, and saw that it was exactly like the one he had worn on entering Erewhon nearly twenty years previously.

The watch, however, was a very small matter; the dress of these two men (for there were only two) was far more disconcerting.  They were not in the Erewhonian costume.  The one was dressed like an Englishman or would-be Englishman, while the other was wearing the same kind of clothes but turned the wrong way round, so that when his face was towards my father his body seemed to have its back towards him, and vice verso.  The man’s head, in fact, appeared to have been screwed right round; and yet it was plain that if he were stripped he would be found built like other people.

What could it all mean?  The men were about fifty years old.  They were well-to-do people, well clad, well fed, and were felt instinctively by my father to belong to the academic classes.  That one of them should be dressed like a sensible Englishman dismayed my father as much as that the other should have a watch, and look as if he had just broken out of Bedlam, or as King Dagobert must have looked if he had worn all his clothes as he is said to have worn his breeches.  Both wore their clothes so easily—­for he who wore them reversed had evidently been measured with a view to this absurd fashion—­that it was plain their dress was habitual.