ance, since the enemy were always chary of showing their boats, and
always tried to convince us they had none. What with absorbed attention
first, and this submersion afterwards, I had lost all my bearings
but the stars, having been long out of sight of my original point of
departure. However, the difficulties of the return were nothing; making
a slight allowance for the floodtide, which could not yet have turned, I
should soon regain the place I had left. So I struck out freshly against
the smooth water, feeling just a little stiffened by the exertion, and
with an occasional chill running up the back of the neck, but with
no nips from sharks, no nudges from alligators, and not a symptom of
fever-and-ague.

Time I could not, of course, measure,--one never can in a novel
position; but, after a reasonable amount of swimming, I began to look,
with a natural interest, for the pier which I had quitted. I noticed,
with some solicitude, that the woods along the friendly shore made one
continuous shadow, and that the line of low bushes on the long causeway
could scarcely be relieved against them, yet I knew where they ought
to be, and the more doubtful I felt about it, the more I put down my
doubts, as if they were unreasonable children. One can scarcely conceive
of the alteration made in familiar objects by bringing the eye as low
as the horizon, especially by night; to distinguish foreshortening is
impossible, and every low near object is equivalent to one higher and
more remote. Still I had the stars; and soon my eye, more practised, was
enabled to select one precise line of bushes as that which marked the
causeway, and for which I must direct my course.

As I swam steadily, but with some sense of fatigue, towards this
phantom-line, I found it difficult to keep my faith steady and my
progress true; everything appeared to shift and waver, in the uncertain
light. The distant trees seemed not trees, but bushes, and the bushes
seemed not exactly bushes, but might, after all, be distant trees. Could
I be so confident that, out of all that low stretch of shore, I could
select the one precise point where the friendly causeway stretched
its long arm to receive me from the water? How easily (some tempter
whispered at my ear) might one swerve a little, on either side, and be
compelled to flounder over half a mile of oozy marsh on an ebbing tide,
before reaching our own shore and that hospitable volley of bullets with
which it would p