He took the lonely way, and only struck into the high-road opposite his own domicile, the shed.

Passing round it, he hovered at its rude door--the one he had himself made, along with the ruder window--and then, treading softly, he stepped to the low stile in the hedge, which had for years made the boundary between the waste land on which the shed stood and Clerk Gum's garden.

Here he halted a minute, looking all ways.

Then he stepped over the stile, crouched down amongst Mr.Gum's cabbages, got under shelter of the hedge, and so stole onwards, until he came to an anchor at the kitchen-window, and laid his ear to the shutter, just as it had recently been laid against the glass in the dining-room of my Lord Hartledon.
That he had a propensity for prying into the private affairs of his neighbours near and distant, there could be little doubt about.

Mr.Pike, however, was not destined on this one occasion to reap any substantial reward.