s weapon had almost cut it in two. We were not long, it may be
supposed, in lighting a fire and cooking the flesh, almost the whole of
which we devoured between us. I sighed as I thought of poor Caesar, and
wished that he had been alive to eat a portion of my share. Our hunger
satisfied, we rolled ourselves in our blankets, and quickly dropped off
to sleep, with our fire burning at our feet. Had a puma wandered that
way, we might easily have become its prey.

It was daylight when we awoke, but another of those heavy fogs which had
before bewildered us covered the face of nature. We felt much inclined
to remain where we were, until the fog should lift, and we might see how
to direct our course. We ate the remainder of the racoon, but soon
afterwards began to suffer from thirst, so Tim advised that we should
move on in the hopes of coming to a pool, if not to the river itself.
He was sure that he could steer a right course. I was doubtful about
that, but as my thirst increased, I was ready to run every risk for the
sake of finding water. On and on we went. Noon had long passed before
we reached a small water-hole in a bottom fringed with reeds. We
eagerly quenched our thirst, in spite of the nauseous taste of the
water. Then Tim, thinking the pool too small to contain alligators,
plunged in and began catching frogs.

"Get a fire lighted, Mr. Maurice; we'll soon have some of these cooked,"
he shouted out to me while thus employed.

Without much hesitation, after they had been a short time cooking, I
plucked off the legs of the creatures, and eagerly ate them. They
served to satisfy our hunger, if they did not do much to maintain our
strength. We should have been more content had we been certain that we
were approaching the river.

Without the sun by day and the stars by night to guide us, we might have
been going, for all we could tell, to the right or left of our course;
or, perhaps, even back again. I regretted not having more carefully
studied the map. I knew that the Saint John River, in many places,
consists of a chain of small lakelets, connected by a narrow stream; but
of their position or extent I was very uncertain.

The next day found us wandering on across the pine-barren, as did the
following, while the mist hung heavily over the country. During this
time Tim killed a snake, and we fell in with another tortoise, which
hunger compelled us at once to kill. Then again the mist cleared off,
an