ng the night, such disease as
would render existence not worth the having--racking rheumatism for
life, or fever, or inflammation, in some of their many forms, and
endless consequences. So I resolved to keep moving as long as I had
power to stir a limb, as this would give me a chance of maintaining
the circulation and animal heat throughout the remaining hours of the
night, if my strength would but hold out so long. Like a drowning man,
I struck out once more for life; again I tried the field-road I had
lately too rashly abandoned; floundered once more through its pools
and its ruts; clambered again on its high banks, or moved along under
the shadow of the wood by its side. At length, after scarcely half an
hour's additional walking, my perseverance had its reward, as I found
myself at the entrance of a village, and heard, not far off, the busy
clatter of some industrious flaxdressers, who were turning night into
day, at their work. This proved to be the termination of my mishap;
for the instructions I received enabled me to find my way home by
three o'clock.

It was my amusement during several subsequent days, to endeavour by
daylight to retrace accurately my midnight wanderings. I found I could
not have walked less than twenty miles, though never at any time more
than three distant from home. I had been incessantly in motion during
nearly eight hours; and was at least thrice on right tracks, which, if
they had been followed up steadily only a little longer, would have
brought me to my quarters. The chiming of the old convent-bells, which
I had mistaken for those of our own pretty little church, came really
from the very opposite direction to what I fancied--the sound I heard
being merely their echo, reflected to my ear from the wooded
hill-side.

Thus, the proposition with which I started--namely, that German woods
are not to be trifled with, or rashly entered without a guide or
compass--is fully sustained by my own luckless experience. Much of the
surrounding country was already well known to me, and in my various
walks I had skirted along and even intersected some of these very
woods; but the way in which they are parcelled out, for the supply of
neighbouring, but unconnected villages with firewood, and the puzzling
manner in which they are shuffled together when the estates of several
proprietors run into one another at a given point, render it
singularly difficult to steer through them even by day, and to the
u