was a sounding-board. All the spectral
space around me, above me, below me was quivering and talking. My very
breath was peopled with murmurs. I have been in many fogs, but none
like this one. If the spirits of the dead should revisit us, they
would whisper, I think, as the air whispered around me then.

How long I groped, learning nothing, I do not know, for when the mind
forgets the body minutes may be long or short, and no count is taken of
them. But at last among the noises that knocked at my ear came a new
note. I heard a human voice.

And then, indeed, I pressed all my faculties into service. I put my
ear to the wet ground and strained it against tree trunks, trying to
weed out the myriad tiny whisperings that assailed me and grasp that
one sound that I wanted and hold it clear. And at last I heard it
unmistakably; there were voices, more than one it seemed.

My ears buzzed with my effort to listen. I heard the sound, lost it,
then heard it again. It was like a child's game. I heard it,
blundered after it, then it disappeared. I turned to go back, and it
came behind and mocked me. It was everywhere and nowhere. It came
near, then faded into silence. The fog suffocated me; I found myself
pressing at it with my hands.

Yet on the whole I made progress. In time the voices grew clearer.
There were several of them, perhaps many. I heard shouting,--orders,
presumably,--and once a clink of metal,--an iron kettle it might have
been. But the sound was back of me, in front of me, at the sides of
me, above me. I could not hold it. It reverberated like the drumming
of a woodcock that comes to the ear from four quarters at once. And
all the time the fog pressed on my eyelids like a hand.

I had left my musket hidden under the canoe, for I could not have used
it in the dampness, so I had only my knife for guard. I carried it
open, and made an occasional notch upon a tree. Once I came to a
notched tree a second time. The old woodland madness was on me, and I
was stepping in circles. Yet the sounds were growing clearer. They
were approaching, though I could not tell from what quarter. I stood
still.

What followed was like a dream; like the dream that I had had the night
after the storm when I woke with sweat cold on me. The fog pinioned me
like a clammy winding-sheet; I could see nothing; I was too chilled to
feel; I was as alone and powerless as a lost canoe in the ocean; but
somewhere on ear