, such as one may feel equally when lost
by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the
place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the
universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of
direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It
required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool.
I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the
contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which
one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened
somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and
everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight
glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely enough, while
swimming,--in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared
plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild
poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive
sensation which drowning men are said to have, that spasmodic passing in
review of one's whole personal history. I had no well-defined anxiety,
felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home
or friends; only it swept over me, as with a sudden tempest, that, if I
meant to get back to my own camp, I must keep my wits about me. I must
not dwell on any other alternative, any more than a boy who climbs a
precipice must look down. Imagination had no business here. That way
madness lay. There was a shore somewhere before me, and I must get to
it, by the ordinary means, before the ebb laid bare the flats, or swept
me below the lower bends of the stream. That was all.

Suddenly a light gleamed for an instant before me, as if from a house
in a grove of great trees upon a bank; and I knew that it came from the
window of a ruined plantation-building, where our most advanced outposts
had their headquarters. The flash revealed to me every point of the
situation. I saw at once where I was, and how I got there: that the tide
had turned while I was swimming, and with a much briefer interval of
slack-water than I had been led to suppose,--that I had been swept a
good way down stream, and was far beyond all possibility of regaining
the point I had left.

Could I, however, retain my strength to swim one or two hundred yards
farther, of which I had no doubt,--and if the water did not ebb too
rapidly, of which I