idea whatever of the glorious sense of exhilaration I had. I swam
with the broad front stroke, I swam on my side, head half submerged,
with a deep under stroke, and I rolled over on my back and swam with the
water lapping my chin. Thus I came to the end of the pool near the old
dam, touched my feet on the bottom, gave a primeval whoop, and dove back
into the water again. I have rarely experienced keener physical joy.
After swimming thus boisterously for a time, I quieted down to long,
leisurely strokes, conscious of the water playing across my shoulders
and singing at my ears, and finally, reaching the centre of the pond, I
turned over on my back and, paddling lazily, watched the slow procession
of light clouds across the sunlit openings of the trees above me. Away
up in the sky I could see a hawk slowly swimming about (in his element
as I was in mine), and nearer at hand, indeed fairly in the thicket
about the pond, I could hear a wood-thrush singing.

And so, shaking the water out of my hair and swimming with long and
leisurely strokes, I returned to the sand-bank, and there, standing in a
spot of warm sunshine, I dried myself with the towel from my bag. And I
said to myself:

"Surely it is good to be alive at a time like this!"

Slowly I drew on my clothes, idling there in the sand, and afterward I
found an inviting spot in an old meadow where I threw myself down on the
grass under an apple-tree and looked up into the shadowy places in the
foliage above me. I felt a delicious sense of physical well-being, and I
was pleasantly tired.

So I lay there--and the next thing I knew, I turned over, feeling cold
and stiff, and opened my eyes upon the dusky shadows of late evening. I
had been sleeping for hours!

The next few minutes (or was it an hour or eternity?), I recall as
containing some of the most exciting and, when all is said, amusing
incidents in my whole life. And I got quite a new glimpse of that
sometimes bumptious person known as David Grayson.

The first sensation I had was one of complete panic. What was I to do?
Where was I to go?

Hastily seizing my bag--and before I was half awake--I started rapidly
across the meadow, in my excitement tripping and falling several times
in the first hundred yards. In daylight I have no doubt that I should
easily have seen a gateway or at least an opening from the old meadow,
but in the fast-gathering darkness it seemed to me that the open field
was surrounded on