This was Old Phelps, whose appetite had failed the day before,--his
imagination being in better working order than his stomach: he had
eaten little that day, and his legs became so groggy that he was
obliged to rest at short intervals. Here was a situation! The
afternoon was wearing away. We had six or seven miles of unknown
wilderness to traverse, a portion of it swampy, in which a progress
of more than a mile an hour is difficult, and the condition of the
guide compelled even a slower march. What should we do in that
lonesome solitude if the guide became disabled? We couldn't carry
him out; could we find our own way out to get assistance? The guide
himself had never been there before; and although he knew the general
direction of our point of egress, and was entirely adequate to
extricate himself from any position in the woods, his knowledge was
of that occult sort possessed by woodsmen which it is impossible to
communicate. Our object was to strike a trail that led from the Au
Sable Pond, the other side of the mountain-range, to an inlet on Mud
Pond. We knew that if we traveled southwestward far enough we must
strike that trail, but how far? No one could tell. If we reached
that trail, and found a boat at the inlet, there would be only a row
of a couple of miles to the house at the foot of the lake. If no
boat was there, then we must circle the lake three or four miles
farther through a cedar-swamp, with no trail in particular. The
prospect was not pleasing. We were short of supplies, for we had not
expected to pass that night in the woods. The pleasure of the
excursion began to develop itself.

We stumbled on in the general direction marked out, through a forest
that began to seem endless as hour after hour passed, compelled as we
were to make long detours over the ridges of the foothills to avoid