you can at any moment go home.

I had now given up all expectation of finding the road, and was steering
my way as well as I could northward towards the valley. In my haste I
made slow progress. Probably the distance I traveled was short, and the
time consumed not long; but I seemed to be adding mile to mile, and hour
to hour. I had time to review the incidents of the Russo-Turkish war,
and to forecast the entire Eastern question; I outlined the characters
of all my companions left in camp, and sketched in a sort of comedy
the sympathetic and disparaging observations they would make on
my adventure; I repeated something like a thousand times, without
contradiction, "What a fool you were to leave the river!" I stopped
twenty times, thinking I heard its loud roar, always deceived by the
wind in the tree-tops; I began to entertain serious doubts about the
compass,--when suddenly I became aware that I was no longer on level
ground: I was descending a slope; I was actually in a ravine. In a
moment more I was in a brook newly formed by the rain. "Thank Heaven!"
I cried: "this I shall follow, whatever conscience or the compass says."
In this region, all streams go, sooner or later, into the valley. This
ravine, this stream, no doubt, led to the river. I splashed and tumbled
along down it in mud and water. Down hill we went together, the fall
showing that I must have wandered to high ground. When I guessed that I
must be close to the river, I suddenly stepped into mud up to my ankles.
It was the road,--running, of course, the wrong way, but still the
blessed road. It was a mere canal of liquid mud; but man had made it,
and it would take me home. I was at least three miles from the point I
supposed I was near at sunset, and I had before me a toilsome walk of
six or seven miles, most of the way in a ditch; but it is truth to say
that I enjoyed every step of it. I was safe; I knew where I was; and I
could have walked till morning. The mind had again got the upper hand
of the body, and began to plume itself on its superiority: it was even
disposed to doubt whether it had been "lost" at all.

III. A FIGHT WITH A TROUT

Trout fishing in the Adirondacks would be a more attractive pastime than
it is but for the popular notion of its danger. The trout is a retiring
and harmless animal, except when he is aroused and forced into a combat;
and then his agility, fierceness, and vindictiveness become apparent. No
one who has studied