Suddenly, God knows, I started, I started.

I imagined--I dreamed--that I saw a pressure in a bed of moss and
violets, _recently made!_ And while I stood gloating upon that
impossible thing, I imagined--I dreamed--the lunacy of it!--that I heard
a laugh...! the laugh, my good God, of a human soul.

Or it seemed half a laugh, and half a sob: and it passed from me in one
fleeting instant.

Laughs, and sobs, and idiot hallucinations, I had often heard before,
feet walking, sounds behind me: and even as I had heard them, I had
known that they were nothing. But brief as was this impression, it was
yet so thrillingly _real_, that my poor heart received, as it were, the
very shock of death, and I fell backward into a mass of moss, supported
on the right palm, while the left pressed my working bosom; and there,
toiling to catch my breath, I lay still, all my soul focussed into my
ears. But now I could hear no sound, save only the vast and audible hum
of the silence of the universe.

There was, however, the foot-print. If my eye and ear should so
conspire against me, that, I thought, was hard.

Still I lay, still, in that same pose, without a stir, sick and
dry-mouthed, infirm and languishing, with dying breaths: but keen,
keen--and malign.

I would wait, I said to myself, I would be artful as snakes, though so
woefully sick and invalid: I would make no sound....

After some minutes I became conscious that my eyes were leering--leering
in one fixed direction: and instantly, the mere fact that I had a sense
of direction proved to me that I must, _in truth_, have heard something!
I strove--I managed--to raise myself: and as I stood upright, feebly
swaying there, not the terrors of death alone were in my breast, but the
authority of the monarch was on my brow.

I moved: I found the strength.

Slow step by slow step, with daintiest noiselessness, I moved to a
thread of moss that from the glade passed into the thicket, and along
its winding way I stepped, in the direction of the sound. Now my ears
caught the purling noise of a brooklet, and following the moss-path, I
was led into a mass of bush only two or three feet higher than my head.
Through this, prowling like a stealthy cat, I wheedled my painful way,
emerged upon a strip of open long-grass, and now was faced, three yards
before me, by a wall of acacia-trees, prickly-pear and pichulas, between
which and a forest beyond I spied a gleam of running water.

On hands