At the first sound of the sneeze, I had started back like a man shot.  The next moment, a great light broke on my mind, and I understood.  Here was the secret of Fenn’s trade:  this was how he forwarded the escape of prisoners, hawking them by night about the country in his covered cart.  There had been Frenchmen close to me; he who had just sneezed was my countryman, my comrade, perhaps already my friend!  I took to my heels in pursuit.  ‘Hold hard!’ I shouted.  ‘Stop!  It’s all right!  Stop!’ But the driver only turned a white face on me for a moment, and redoubled his efforts, bending forward, plying his whip and crying to his horses; these lay themselves down to the gallop and beat the highway with flying hoofs; and the cart bounded after them among the ruts and fled in a halo of rain and spattering mud.  But a minute since, and it had been trundling along like a lame cow; and now it was off as though drawn by Apollo’s coursers.  There is no telling what a man can do, until you frighten him!

It was as much as I could do myself, though I ran valiantly, to maintain my distance; and that (since I knew my countrymen so near) was become a chief point with me.  A hundred yards farther on the cart whipped out of the high-road into a lane embowered with leafless trees, and became lost to view.  When I saw it next, the driver had increased his advantage considerably, but all danger was at an end, and the horses had again declined into a hobbling walk.  Persuaded that they could not escape me, I took my time, and recovered my breath as I followed them.

Presently the lane twisted at right angles, and showed me a gate and the beginning of a gravel sweep; and a little after, as I continued to advance, a red brick house about seventy years old, in a fine style of architecture, and presenting a front of many windows to a lawn and garden.  Behind, I could see outhouses and the peaked roofs of stacks; and I judged that a manor-house had in some way declined to be the residence of a tenant-farmer, careless alike of appearances and substantial comfort.  The marks of neglect were visible on every side, in flower-bushes straggling beyond the borders, in the ill-kept turf, and in the broken windows that were incongruously patched with paper or stuffed with rags.  A thicket of trees, mostly evergreen, fenced the place round and secluded it from the eyes of prying neighbours.  As I came in view of it, on that melancholy winter’s morning, in the deluge of the falling rain, and with the wind that now rose in occasional gusts and hooted over the old chimneys, the cart had already drawn up at the front-door steps, and the driver was already in earnest discourse with Mr. Burchell Fenn.  He was standing with his hands behind his back—­a man of a gross, misbegotten face and body, dewlapped like a bull and red as a harvest moon; and in his jockey cap, blue coat and top boots, he had much the air of a good, solid tenant-farmer.