 constable's duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the police
court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous practices on the highway.
The policeman thereupon lay in wait for Jude, and one day accosted him and
cautioned him.
    As Jude had to get up at three o'clock in the morning to heat the oven, and
mix and set in the bread that he distributed later in the day, he was obliged to
go to bed at night immediately after laying the sponge; so that if he could not
read his classics on the highways he could hardly study at all. The only thing
to be done was, therefore, to keep a sharp eye ahead and around him as well as
he could in the circumstances, and slip away his books as soon as anybody loomed
in the distance, the policeman in particular. To do that official justice, he
did not put himself much in the way of Jude's bread-cart, considering that in
such a lonely district the chief danger was to Jude himself, and often on seeing
the white tilt over the hedges he would move in another direction.
    On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about sixteen,
and had been stumbling through the Carmen Sæculare, on his way home, he found
himself to be passing over the high edge of the plateau by the Brown House. The
light had changed, and it was the sense of this which had caused him to look up.
The sun was going down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the
woods in the opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem
that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had caused
him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and glancing round
to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the roadside bank with open book.
He turned first to the shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and
critically at his doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand,
as he began:
 
                       »Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana!«
 
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which Jude repeated under
the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never have thought of humouring
in broad daylight.
    Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or acquired,
in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to such a lapse from
common-sense and custom in one who wished, next to being a scholar, to be a
Christian divine. It had all come of reading heathen
