d to me that I should never get to the end of the sand-dunes,
but when at last I did come off them I heartily wished that I was back
upon them again; for the sea in that part comes by some creek up the
back of the beach, forming at low tide a great desolate salt-marsh,
which must be a forlorn place even in the daytime, but upon such a night
as that it was a most dreary wilderness. At first it was but a softness
of the ground, causing me to slip as I walked, but soon the mud was over
my ankles and half-way up to my knees, so that each foot gave a loud
flop as I raised it, and a dull splash as I set it down again. I would
willingly have made my way out, even if I had to return to the
sand-dunes, but in trying to pick my path I had lost all my bearings,
and the air was so full of the sounds of the storm that the sea seemed
to be on every side of me. I had heard of how one may steer oneself by
observation of the stars, but my quiet English life had not taught me
how such things were done, and had I known I could scarcely have
profited by it, since the few stars which were visible peeped out here
and there in the rifts of the flying storm-clouds. I wandered on then,
wet and weary, trusting to fortune, but always blundering deeper and
deeper into this horrible bog, until I began to think that my first
night in France was destined also to be my last, and that the heir of
the de Lavals was destined to perish of cold and misery in the depths of
this obscene morass.

I must have toiled for many miles in this dreary fashion, sometimes
coming upon shallower mud and sometimes upon deeper, but never making my
way on to the dry, when I perceived through the gloom something which
turned my heart even heavier than it had been before. This was a
curious clump of some whitish shrub--cotton-grass of a flowering
variety--which glimmered suddenly before me in the darkness. Now, an
hour earlier I had passed just such a square-headed, whitish clump; so
that I was confirmed in the opinion which I had already begun to form,
that I was wandering in a circle. To make it certain I stooped down,
striking a momentary flash from my tinder-box, and there sure enough was
my own old track very clearly marked in the brown mud in front of me.
At this confirmation of my worst fears I threw my eyes up to heaven in
my despair, and there I saw something which for the first time gave me a
clue in the uncertainty which surrounded me.

It was nothing else