om my head, I became wide awake again. After another
interval of wakefulness, during which I realized keenly how tired my
limbs were, and after quietly enjoying some of the experiences of my
neighbors, the demands of nature again became paramount, and I dozed
off. With a sudden sense of a harsh scraping along the back of my head,
and a dim realization of the fact that my knees had again refused duty,
I came to myself just in time to keep from sitting on the ground, this
time sliding down the tree instead of pitching forward. After a walk
down to the river to view the situation again, I returned to my tree,
adjusted my position, to guard as well as I could against former
experiences, and gradually dozed off in the belief that I was this time
scientifically and safely propped. Suddenly I realized that I was
falling, and became conscious enough to make three or four rapid steps
forward, to save myself, before I stumbled over a log and went head
first to the ground. After this, I never went to sleep during the
balance of the night, but I contented myself with a succession of nods
between the intervals of knee-bendings and losses of balance. Try it and
see how it works.

I have slept on the wet ground--slept soundly, and never taken cold from
it, but not in a boggy location such as that was on that night, and we
all stood up in preference, again a choice of the lesser evil.

It might be asked why we did not go back to the high ground instead of
remaining in the bottom. No one who has ever tramped over such a
miserable road as that by which we had reached the bottom--for two and a
half miles in the dark--will be likely to question why we preferred to
stay where we were. It is doubtful whether we would have undertaken to
retrace our steps over the corduroy road even if we had known in advance
just what our night's experience was to be.

The next morning when we went down to the river we found that it had
risen several feet during the night.

The road reached the river at a point of land which projected some
distance, and where the road had been comparatively dry the night
before, behind the point, we now had to wade in order to reach the ferry
landing.

It was useless to attempt hailing the ferry-boat, so we went back to our
stamping ground and breakfasted upon what corn we could pick out of the
ground around the spot where former campers had tarried. This corn was
the scaled or wasted kernels left by horses at their feed