And Now I Imagined That A Spectre Was
Walking By My Side.
This was Famine.
To be sure, I had only
recently eaten a hearty luncheon: but the pangs of hunger got hold on
me when I thought that I should have no supper, no breakfast; and, as
the procession of unattainable meals stretched before me, I grew
hungrier and hungrier. I could feel that I was becoming gaunt, and
wasting away: already I seemed to be emaciated. It is astonishing
how speedily a jocund, well-conditioned human being can be
transformed into a spectacle of poverty and want, Lose a man in the
Woods, drench him, tear his pantaloons, get his imagination running
on his lost supper and the cheerful fireside that is expecting him,
and he will become haggard in an hour. I am not dwelling upon these
things to excite the reader's sympathy, but only to advise him, if he
contemplates an adventure of this kind, to provide himself with
matches, kindling wood, something more to eat than one raw trout, and
not to select a rainy night for it.
Nature is so pitiless, so unresponsive, to a person in trouble! I
had read of the soothing companionship of the forest, the pleasure of
the pathless woods. But I thought, as I stumbled along in the dismal
actuality, that, if I ever got out of it, I would write a letter to
the newspapers, exposing the whole thing. There is an impassive,
stolid brutality about the woods that has never been enough insisted
on.
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