I landed, stiff enough as you will guess, but pleased to be on shore
again. It was a melancholy neighbourhood of low islands, overgrown
with rank grass and bushes, salt water encircling them, and inside sandy
dunes and hummocks with shallow pools, gleaming ghostly in the retreating
daylight, while beyond these rose the black bosses of what looked like
a forest. Thither I made my way, plunging uncomfortably through shallows,
and tripping over blackened branches which, lying just below the surface,
quivered like snakes as the evening breeze ruffled each surface, until
the ground hardened under foot, and presently I was standing, hungry
and faint but safe, on dry land again.

The forest was so close to the sea, one could not advance without
entering it, and once within its dark arcades every way looked equally
gloomy and hopeless. I struggled through tangles night made more and
more impenetrable each minute, until presently I could go no further,
and where a dense canopy of trees overhead gave out for a minute on the
edge of a swampy hollow, I determined to wait for daylight.

Never was there a more wet or weary traveller, or one more desperately
lonely than he who wrapped himself up in the miserable insufficiency of
his wet rags, and without fire or supper crept amongst the exposed roots
of a tree growing out of a bank, and prepared to hope grimly for morning.

Round and round meanwhile was drawn the close screen of night, till
the clearing in front was blotted out, and only the tree-tops, black as
rugged hills one behind the other, stood out against the heavy purple of
the circlet of sky above. As the evening deepened the quaintest noises
began on every hand--noises so strange and bewildering that as I cowered
down with my teeth chattering, and stared hard into the impenetrable, they