every side by impenetrable forests. Absurd as it
may seem, for no one knows what his mind will do at such a moment,
I recalled vividly a passage from Stanley's story of his search for
Livingstone, in which he relates how he escaped from a difficult place
in the jungle by KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD.

I print these words in capitals because they seemed written that night
upon the sky. KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD, I entered the forest on one side
of the meadow (with quite a heroic sense of adventure), but scraped my
shin on a fallen log and ran into a tree with bark on it that felt like
a gigantic currycomb--and stopped!

Up to this point I think I was still partly asleep. Now, however, I
waked up.

"All you need," said I to myself in my most matter-of-fact tone, "is a
little cool sense. Be quiet now and reason it out."

So I stood there for some moments reasoning it out, with the result that
I turned back and found the meadow again.

"What a fool I've been!" I said. "Isn't it perfectly plain that I should
have gone down to the pond, crossed over the inlet, and reached the road
by the way I came?"

Having thus settled my problem, and congratulating myself on my
perspicacity, I started straight for the mill-pond, but to my utter
amazement, in the few short hours while I had been asleep, that entire
body of water had evaporated, the dam had disappeared, and the stream
had dried up. I must certainly present the facts in this remarkable case
to some learned society.

I then decided to return to the old apple-tree where I had slept, which
now seemed quite like home, but, strange to relate, the apple-tree had
also completely vanished from the enchanted meadow. At that I began to
suspect that in coming out of the forest I had somehow got into another
and somewhat similar old field. I have never had a more confused or
eerie sensation; not fear, but a sort of helplessness in which for
an instant I actually began to doubt whether it was I myself, David
Grayson, who stood there in the dark meadow, or whether I was the victim
of a peculiarly bad dream. I suppose many other people have had these
sensations under similar conditions, but they were new to me.

I turned slowly around and looked for a light; I think I never wanted so
much to see some sign of human habitation as I did at that moment.

What a coddled world we live in, truly. That being out after dark in a
meadow should so disturb the very centre of our being! In all my life,