r, too, somewhere in the air behind me. The
next second Shorthouse came at me with a single bound.

To this day I cannot quite tell how it happened. It is still a wild
confusion and a fever of horror in my mind, but from somewhere I drew
more than my usual allowance of strength, and before he could well have
realised what I meant to do, I had his throat between my fingers. He
opened his teeth and the knife dropped at once, for I gave him a squeeze
he need never forget. Before, my muscles had felt like so much soaked
paper; now they recovered their natural strength, and more besides. I
managed to work ourselves along the rafter until the hay was beneath us,
and then, completely exhausted, I let go my hold and we swung round
together and dropped on to the hay, he clawing at me in the air even as
we fell.

The struggle that began by my fighting for his life ended in a wild
effort to save my own, for Shorthouse was quite beside himself, and had
no idea what he was doing. Indeed, he has always averred that he
remembers nothing of the entire night's experiences after the time when
he first woke me from sleep. A sort of deadly mist settled over him, he
declares, and he lost all sense of his own identity. The rest was a
blank until he came to his senses under a mass of hay with me on the top
of him.

It was the hay that saved us, first by breaking the fall and then by
impeding his movements so that I was able to prevent his choking me to
death.

THE WOOD OF THE DEAD

One summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the
room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and
there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table
and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We
exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did
not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the
important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve
miles over a difficult country.

The fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of
luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep
blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It
was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the
orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so
brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage.

The inn-keeper's daughte