ng a path
through the obstruction, while Toby fell into the rear.

Two or three times I endeavoured to insinuate myself between the canes,
and, by dint of coaxing and bending them, to make some progress; but a
bull-frog might as well have tried to work a passage through the teeth of
a comb, and I gave up the attempt in despair.

Half wild with meeting an obstacle we had so little anticipated, I threw
myself desperately against it, crushing to the ground the canes with which
I came in contact, and rising to my feet again, repeated the action with
like effect. Twenty minutes of this violent exercise almost exhausted me,
but it carried us some way into the thicket; when Toby, who had been
reaping the benefit of my labours by following close at my heels, proposed
to become pioneer in turn, and accordingly passed ahead with a view of
affording me a respite from my exertions. As, however, with his slight
frame he made but bad work of it, I was soon obliged to resume my old
place again.

On we toiled, the perspiration starting from our bodies in floods, our
limbs torn and lacerated with the splintered fragments of the broken
canes, until we had proceeded perhaps as far as the middle of the brake,
when suddenly it ceased raining, and the atmosphere around us became close
and sultry beyond expression. The elasticity of the reeds quickly
recovering from the temporary pressure of our bodies, caused them to
spring back to their original position, so that they closed in upon us as
we advanced, and prevented the circulation of the little air which might
otherwise have reached us. Besides this, their great height completely
shut us out from the view of surrounding objects, and we were not certain
but that we might have been going all the time in a wrong direction.

Fatigued with my long-continued efforts, and panting for breath, I felt
myself completely incapacitated for any further exertion. I rolled up the
sleeve of my frock, and squeezed the moisture it contained into my parched
mouth. But the few drops I managed to obtain gave me little relief, and I
sank down for a moment with a sort of dogged apathy, from which I was
aroused by Toby, who had devised a plan to free us from the net in which
we had become entangled.

He was laying about him lustily with his sheath-knife, lopping the canes
right and left, like a reaper, and soon made quite a clearing around us.
This sight reanimated me; and seizing my own knife, I hacked and hew