o be emaciated. It is astonishing how speedily a
jocund, well-conditioned human being can be transformed into a spectacle
of poverty and want, Lose a man in the Woods, drench him, tear his
pantaloons, get his imagination running on his lost supper and the
cheerful fireside that is expecting him, and he will become haggard
in an hour. I am not dwelling upon these things to excite the reader's
sympathy, but only to advise him, if he contemplates an adventure of
this kind, to provide himself with matches, kindling wood, something
more to eat than one raw trout, and not to select a rainy night for it.

Nature is so pitiless, so unresponsive, to a person in trouble! I had
read of the soothing companionship of the forest, the pleasure of
the pathless woods. But I thought, as I stumbled along in the dismal
actuality, that, if I ever got out of it, I would write a letter to
the newspapers, exposing the whole thing. There is an impassive, stolid
brutality about the woods that has never been enough insisted on.
I tried to keep my mind fixed upon the fact of man's superiority to
Nature; his ability to dominate and outwit her. My situation was an
amusing satire on this theory. I fancied that I could feel a sneer in
the woods at my detected conceit. There was something personal in
it. The downpour of the rain and the slipperiness of the ground were
elements of discomfort; but there was, besides these, a kind of terror
in the very character of the forest itself. I think this arose not
more from its immensity than from the kind of stolidity to which I have
alluded. It seemed to me that it would be a sort of relief to kick the
trees. I don't wonder that the bears fall to, occasionally, and scratch
the bark off the great pines and maples, tearing it angrily away. One
must have some vent to his feelings. It is a common experience of people
lost in the woods to lose their heads; and even the woodsmen themselves
are not free from this panic when some accident has thrown them out of
their reckoning. Fright unsettles the judgment: the oppressive silence
of the woods is a vacuum in which the mind goes astray. It's a hollow
sham, this pantheism, I said; being "one with Nature" is all humbug: I
should like to see somebody. Man, to be sure, is of very little account,
and soon gets beyond his depth; but the society of the least human being
is better than this gigantic indifference. The "rapture on the lonely
shore" is agreeable only when you know