shook him; but he sat there
motionless, looking up into the branches of the tree, away from her,
watching the sun through the greenness of the leaves, and the
quivering throat of the bird. She rose up and left him in indignation;
then darkness fell. He tried to follow her, but had no power to move
himself. He tried to cry out, but his tongue was joined to the roof of
his mouth. Making a great effort, he came to himself.

When he pushed up his arms to throw off his covering, they seemed to
be lifting a weight of surpassing heaviness. He sat upright and tried
to open his eyes; he was blind--he could see nothing. He groped to
feel his eyeballs with his hands; but his fingers were frozen--they
could feel nothing. He rose to his feet in panic and stood there
swaying, as though he had been set upon a dizzy pedestal which had
grown to be part of himself, so that he could not move, but could only
bend.

"I must keep quiet," he told himself; "I must keep quiet. If I get
frightened, I shall wander away to my death."

When he tried to step forward his feet clapped together like solid
blocks of ice. Very distantly, it seemed to him, he could make out a
little glow of red and feel a breath of warmness. Going down on his
hands and knees, he crawled towards it. It was coming to meet him;
they had met. He lay down beside the redness and his panic left him.

Then he became conscious that it was hurting him and he commenced to
hate it. In struggling to get away from it, he found that he could
move more freely. Sensation had come into his hands; raising them he
felt his eyes. His great terror was not of death, but that he should
be forever sightless. He ran his fingers across his eyes and found
that they were covered with flesh--that his eyelids were frozen
together. With his two hands he forced them apart, and gazed about
him. Wherever he looked there was endless space with nothing to deter
him, stretching away on every side. The moon, in her last quarter, was
barely visible--a mere shadow of silver in the sky; so indistinct was
his vision, that it seemed to him as though he were looking at the
image of the firmament reflected in water, rather than at the stars
themselves. Yet, in the certain renewal of his sight, there came to
him a gladness which he had not known for many a day.

When he turned toward the fire, he perceived the cause of his mishap:
he had overslept himself and it was nearly out. By the way in which it
was scatte