far in a blazing July
sun along an unshaded high-road; it was evening now, and they were
wondering where they should sleep, and how they should get some supper,
when they came to a narrow lane turning off to the right, with steep
banks on each side of it. There was a sign-post, which, interpreted by
Frank, said, To Crowhurst--one mile.

The boys consulted a little, and soon determined to leave the high-road,
which seemed endless, as far as they could see, and try their fortune in
Crowhurst for the night. It was not long before they came to it, lying
in a hollow, and snugly sheltered by gently rising wooded ground. It
was a very little village indeed. There was a small grey church with a
stumpy square tower, and a cheerful red-brick inn called the Holly Bush,
with a swinging sign in front of it; there were half a dozen little
cottages with gay gardens, and, standing close to the road, there was a
long, low, many-gabled house which was evidently the vicarage. It was
such a snug, smiling little settlement altogether that Barney and Frank,
slouching along dusty and tired, felt quite out of place and uneasy at
the glances cast at them by the people standing at their open doors or
in their trim gardens. However, there was a bench outside the inn, and
there they presently sat down to rest and look about them. The vicarage
was just opposite; and one of its wide lattice-windows being open, the
boys could see plainly into the room, where the most prominent object
was the figure of an old gentleman, with grey hair and a velvet
skull-cap; he sat at a table writing busily, and everything was so quiet
and still that they could even hear the scratch of his quill pen, and
the rustle of the sheets of manuscript which he threw from time to time
on the floor. Sometimes he looked vaguely out of the window, and
sometimes he took off his skull-cap and rubbed his bald head with his
pocket handkerchief--then he bent busily over his writing again. Frank,
watching him lazily, wondered what he could have to write so much about,
and then it occurred to him that perhaps he might be the schoolmaster
correcting the boys' exercises; from that, his mind wandered back to
Danecross and the school-room there, where it used to be so hot in
summer, and the bees buzzed and murmured so in the garden outside, and
the boys within. And gradually, his ideas becoming confused between
bees and boys, and being very tired, he forgot the old gentleman and
f