hird time he slowly
raises his head and stares blankly at you. You yell it at him then for
a fourth time, and he repeats it after you. He ponders while you count
a couple of hundred, after which, speaking at the rate of three words a
minute, he fancies you "couldn't do better than--" Here he catches
sight of another idiot coming down the road and bawls out to him the
particulars, requesting his advice. The two then argue the case for
a quarter of an hour or so, and finally agree that you had better go
straight down the lane, round to the right and cross by the third stile,
and keep to the left by old Jimmy Milcher's cow-shed, and across the
seven-acre field, and through the gate by Squire Grubbin's hay-stack,
keeping the bridle-path for awhile till you come opposite the hill where
the windmill used to be--but it's gone now--and round to the right,
leaving Stiggin's plantation behind you; and you say "Thank you" and go
away with a splitting headache, but without the faintest notion of your
way, the only clear idea you have on the subject being that somewhere
or other there is a stile which has to be got over; and at the next turn
you come upon four stiles, all leading in different directions!

We had undergone this ordeal two or three times. We had tramped over
fields. We had waded through brooks and scrambled over hedges and walls.
We had had a row as to whose fault it was that we had first lost our
way. We had got thoroughly disagreeable, footsore, and weary. But
throughout it all the hope of that duck kept us up. A fairy-like vision,
it floated before our tired eyes and drew us onward. The thought of it
was as a trumpet-call to the fainting. We talked of it and cheered each
other with our recollections of it. "Come along," we said; "the duck
will be spoiled."

We felt a strong temptation, at one point, to turn into a village inn
as we passed and have a cheese and a few loaves between us, but we
heroically restrained ourselves: we should enjoy the duck all the better
for being famished.

We fancied we smelled it when we go into the town and did the last
quarter of a mile in three minutes. We rushed upstairs, and washed
ourselves, and changed our clothes, and came down, and pulled our chairs
up to the table, and sat and rubbed our hands while the landlady removed
the covers, when I seized the knife and fork and started to carve.

It seemed to want a lot of carving. I struggled with it for about five
minutes without