es, when a visitor chanced to
stay into evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct
him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him
the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided
rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus
on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived
about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route.
A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the
greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get
home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several
heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the leaves were very wet, they were
drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the
village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it
with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having
come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for
the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile
out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not
knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well
as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a
snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and
yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he
knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize
a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in
Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater.
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously,
steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if
we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing
of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned
round--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut
in this world to be lost--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness
of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often
as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are
lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to
find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our
relations.

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the
village to get a shoe fr