a steam-power boot-jack.

And so for hours I walked on in my stockings without inconvenience. Even
when I trod upon gorse bushes, I did not feel it, as my feet had become
as insensible as my hands. It had occurred to me now that I might be in
the Carding Mill valley, and that I would steer my course on that
supposition. It was fortunate that I did so, for I was beginning to
think that I could not now hold out much longer, and was struggling in a
part where the drifts were up nearly to my neck, when I heard what I had
thought never to hear again--the blessed sound of human voices,
children's voices, talking and laughing, and apparently sliding not very
far off. I called to them with all my might, but judge of my dismay when
sudden and total silence took the place of the merry voices I had so
lately heard! I shouted again and again, and said that I was lost, but
there was no reply. It was a bitter disappointment, something like that
of the sailor shipwrecked on a desert island, who sees a sail approaching
and thinks that he is saved, when as he gazes the vessel shifts her
course and disappears on the horizon, dashing his hopes to the ground. It
appeared, as I learned afterwards, that these children saw _me_, though I
could not see them, and ran away terrified at my unearthly aspect.
Doubtless the head of a man protruding from a deep snow drift, crowned
and bearded with ice like a ghastly emblem of winter, was a sight to
cause a panic among children, and one cannot wonder that they ran off to
communicate the news that "there was the bogie in the snow." Happily,
however, for the bogie, he had noticed the direction from which these
voices came, and struggling forward again, I soon found myself
sufficiently near to the Carding Mill to recognise the place, blind as I
was. A little girl now ventured to approach me, as, true to the
instincts of her nature, the idea dawned upon her that I was no goblin of
the mountains, no disagreeable thing from a world beneath popped up
through the snow, but a real fellow-creature in distress. I spoke to her
and told her that I was the clergyman of Ratlinghope, and had been lost
in the snow on the hill all night. As she did not answer at once, I
suppose she was taking a careful observation of me, for after a few
moments she said, "Why, you look like Mr. Carr of Wolstaston." "I am Mr.
Carr," I replied; whereupon the boys, who had previously run away, and,
as I imagine, taken refuge b