s that winter, when I was twenty-one
years old, a very strange thing, which affrighted the rest, and made me
feel uncomfortable. Not that there was anything in it, to do harm to any
one, only that none could explain it, except by attributing it to the
devil. The weather was very mild and open, and scarcely any snow fell;
at any rate, none lay on the ground, even for an hour, in the highest
part of Exmoor; a thing which I knew not before nor since, as long as
I can remember. But the nights were wonderfully dark, as though with no
stars in the heaven; and all day long the mists were rolling upon
the hills and down them, as if the whole land were a wash-house. The
moorland was full of snipes and teal, and curlews flying and crying, and
lapwings flapping heavily, and ravens hovering round dead sheep; yet no
redshanks nor dottrell, and scarce any golden plovers (of which we have
great store generally) but vast lonely birds, that cried at night, and
moved the whole air with their pinions; yet no man ever saw them. It was
dismal as well as dangerous now for any man to go fowling (which of late
I loved much in the winter) because the fog would come down so thick
that the pan of the gun was reeking, and the fowl out of sight ere the
powder kindled, and then the sound of the piece was so dead, that the
shooter feared harm, and glanced over his shoulder. But the danger of
course was far less in this than in losing of the track, and falling
into the mires, or over the brim of a precipice.

Nevertheless, I must needs go out, being young and very stupid, and
feared of being afraid; a fear which a wise man has long cast by, having
learned of the manifold dangers which ever and ever encompass us. And
beside this folly and wildness of youth, perchance there was something,
I know not what, of the joy we have in uncertainty. Mother, in fear
of my missing home--though for that matter, I could smell supper, when
hungry, through a hundred land-yards of fog--my dear mother, who thought
of me ten times for one thought about herself, gave orders to ring the
great sheep-bell, which hung above the pigeon-cote, every ten minutes of
the day, and the sound came through the plaits of fog, and I was vexed
about it, like the letters of a copy-book. It reminded me, too, of
Blundell's bell, and the grief to go into school again.

But during those two months of fog (for we had it all the winter), the
saddest and the heaviest thing was to stand beside the