n the woods.

Poor Arthur's mind was a sort of blank for some minutes. All the trees
seemed alike--his memory seemed obliterated. What horrid bewilderment
had possession of his faculties? Shutting him in, as by the walls of a
living tomb, the great frowning forest stood on all sides. A mariner on
a plank in mid-ocean could not have felt more hopeless and helpless.

Rousing himself with a shake from the numb, chill sensation which had
begun to paralyze exertion, he thought that, if he could reach the little
creek before mentioned, he might pursue his course, as it probably fell
into their own lake at the foot of the Cedars. Keeping the pine-tops
in a right line behind him, he succeeded in striking the creek, and
discovering which way it flowed. After pushing his way some hours along
a path of innumerable difficulties, he found himself, in the waning
light, at the edge of a cypress swamp.

Almost man though he was, he could have sat down and cried. Blackest
night seemed to nestle under those matted boughs, and the sullen gleams
of stagnant water--the plash of a frog jumping in--the wading birds that
stalked about--told him what to expect if he went farther. At the same
instant a gleam of copper sunset struck across the heavens on the tops
of the evergreens, and the west was not in the direction that the
wanderer had imagined; he now easily calculated that he had all this
time been walking _from_ home instead of towards it.

Strange to say, a ray of hope was brought upon that sunbeam, even
coupled with the conviction that he had been hitherto so wofully astray.
To-morrow might be bright (and to all the wanderers in this world the
anchor is to-morrow); he would be able to guide his course by the sun,
and would come all right. He resolved to spend the night in a tree near
his fire for fear of wild beasts, and selected a fine branching cedar
for his dormitory. Laying his gun securely in one of the forks, and
coiling himself up as snugly as possible, where four boughs radiated
from the trunk, about twenty feet from the ground, he settled himself to
sleep as in an arm-chair, with the great hushing silence of the forest
around him. Unusual as his circumstances were, he was soon wrapt in a
dreamless slumber.

Dull and slow dawned the November morning among the trees; broad
daylight on their tops, when but a twilight reached the earth, sixty or
eighty feet below. Arthur found himself rather stiff and chill after
his unwonted