As soon as he had closed the door, we were on the march. We turned
the corner and took the road to the right. The walking was
smoother here, and the street broader. We were soon past most of
the shanties, and following a country road, where the buildings
were far apart. They seemed to be large houses, set back from the
road, with carefully kept lawns. Mr. Daddles stopped and peered at
one of them through the fog.

"Here it is, I think. This one--or the next. No; it's this one, I
remember the fence. It would never do to walk right up the front
path when you're going to crack a crib. We'll have to get in a
back window, anyway, so we'd better go a little farther down the
road, get over the wall, circle round, and come up from the rear."

We carried out this plan, so far as getting over the wall, and
then set out across a field. This was high ground, but the village
behind us was still covered with the fog, and all we could see in
its direction was a white cloud of vapor. The road we had just
left wound on, down the hill again, and toward what might have
been a dark clump of trees. The grass in the field was short and
scrubby, and worn quite bare in places. There was a path which Mr.
Daddles knew, and this we followed in single file.

All of a sudden we heard a strange, thumping sound, right in front
of us. We stopped short. There was a dark, indistinct mass of
something moving slowly toward us. It seemed to be humped up, like
a man crawling forward on his hands and knees. Almost as soon as
we stopped, it--whatever it was--stopped too. It was a very
unpleasant thing to find in a lonely field, in the middle of the