and healthy as you may: and when you are, you will find it a very
ugly feeling. I hope that that day you may have a stout staunch
friend by you who is not beat; for, if you have not, you had best
lie where you are, and wait for better times, as poor Tom did.

He could not get on. The sun was burning, and yet he felt chill
all over. He was quite empty, and yet he felt quite sick. There
was but two hundred yards of smooth pasture between him and the
cottage, and yet he could not walk down it. He could hear the
stream murmuring only one field beyond it, and yet it seemed to him
as if it was a hundred miles off.

He lay down on the grass till the beetles ran over him, and the
flies settled on his nose. I don't know when he would have got up
again, if the gnats and the midges had not taken compassion on him.
But the gnats blew their trumpets so loud in his ear, and the
midges nibbled so at his hands and face wherever they could find a
place free from soot, that at last he woke up, and stumbled away,
down over a low wall, and into a narrow road, and up to the
cottage-door.

And a neat pretty cottage it was, with clipped yew hedges all round
the garden, and yews inside too, cut into peacocks and trumpets and
teapots and all kinds of queer shapes. And out of the open door
came a noise like that of the frogs on the Great-A, when they know
that it is going to be scorching hot to-morrow--and how they know
that I don't know, and you don't know, and nobody knows.

He came slowly up to the open door, which was all hung round with
clematis and roses; and then peeped in, half afraid.