With round ears! He peered hard, but he could see nothing.
"Nonsense," said he.
He sat up with an idea that he had dropped into a nightmare, gave his horse the slightest touch of the whip, spoke to it and peered again over the hedge.

The glare of his lamp, however, together with the mist, rendered things indistinct, and he could distinguish nothing.

It came into his head, he says, that there could be nothing there, because if there was his horse would have shied at it.

Yet for all that his senses remained nervously awake.
Then he heard quite distinctly a soft pattering of feet in pursuit along the road.
He would not believe his ears about that.

He could not look round, for the road had a sinuous curve just there.