delicate Genevan
timepiece.

The light disclosed fully the suspected fact that our bed had been made
in a slight depression: the under rubber blanket spread in this had
prevented the rain from soaking into the ground, and we had been lying
in what was in fact a well-contrived bathtub. While Old Phelps was
pulling himself together, and we were wringing some gallons of water out
of our blankets, we questioned the old man about the "squawk," and what
bird was possessed of such a voice. It was not a bird at all, he said,
but a cat, the black-cat of the woods, larger than the domestic animal,
and an ugly customer, who is fond of fish, and carries a pelt that is
worth two or three dollars in the market. Occasionally he blunders into
a sable-trap; and he is altogether hateful in his ways, and has the most
uncultivated voice that is heard in the woods. We shall remember him as
one of the least pleasant phantoms of that cheerful night when we lay
in the storm, fearing any moment the advent to one of us of the grimmest
messenger.

We rolled up and shouldered our wet belongings, and, before the shades
had yet lifted from the saturated bushes, pursued our march. It was a
relief to be again in motion, although our progress was slow, and it
was a question every rod whether the guide could go on. We had the day
before us; but if we did not find a boat at the inlet a day might not
suffice, in the weak condition of the guide, to extricate us from our
ridiculous position. There was nothing heroic in it; we had no object:
it was merely, as it must appear by this time, a pleasure excursion,
and we might be lost or perish in it without reward and with little
sympathy. We had something like a hour and a half of stumbling through
the swamp when suddenly we stood in the little trail! Slight as it was,
it appeared to us a very Broadway to Paradise if broad ways ever lead
thither. Phelps hailed it and sank down in it like one reprieved from
death. But the boat? Leaving him, we quickly ran a quarter of a mile
down to the inlet. The boat was there. Our shout to the guide would
have roused him out of a death-slumber. He came down the trail with the
agility of an aged deer: never was so glad a sound in his ear, he said,
as that shout. It was in a very jubilant mood that we emptied the boat
of water, pushed off, shipped the clumsy oars, and bent to the two-mile
row through the black waters of the winding, desolate channel, and over
the lake, whose