ourself
to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its
circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized
with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed
to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares
hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped
it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a
man.

Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up.
During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the
afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the
village. Here he asked a man whereabouts Christminster lay.

"Christminster? Oh, well, out by there yonder; though I've never bin
there--not I. I've never had any business at such a place."

The man pointed north-eastward, in the very direction where lay that
field in which Jude had so disgraced himself. There was something
unpleasant about the coincidence for the moment, but the fearsomeness
of this fact rather increased his curiosity about the city. The
farmer had said he was never to be seen in that field again; yet
Christminster lay across it, and the path was a public one. So,
stealing out of the hamlet, he descended into the same hollow which
had witnessed his punishment in the morning, never swerving an inch
from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent on the
other side till the track joined the highway by a little clump of
trees. Here the ploughed land ended, and all before him was bleak
open down.

III

Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of
it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined
the sky. At the very top it was crossed at right angles by a green
"ridgeway"--the Ickneild Street and original Roman road through the
district. This ancient track ran east and west for many miles, and
down almost to within living memory had been used for driving flocks
and herds to fairs and markets. But it was now neglected and
overgrown.

The boy had never before strayed so far north as this from the
nestling hamlet in which he had been deposited by the carrier from a
railway station southward, one dark evening some few months earlier,
and till now he had had no suspicion that such a wide, flat,
low-lying country lay so near at hand, under the very verge of his
upland world. The whole northern semicircle between ea