What was I to do?
Where was I to go?
Hastily seizing my bag--and before I was half awake--I started rapidly across the meadow, in my excitement tripping and falling several times in the first hundred yards.

In daylight I have no doubt that I should easily have seen a gateway or at least an opening from the old meadow, but in the fast-gathering darkness it seemed to me that the open field was surrounded on every side by impenetrable forests.

Absurd as it may seem, for no one knows what his mind will do at such a moment, I recalled vividly a passage from Stanley's story of his search for Livingstone, in which he relates how he escaped from a difficult place in the jungle by KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD.
I print these words in capitals because they seemed written that night upon the sky.

KEEPING STRAIGHT AHEAD, I entered the forest on one side of the meadow (with quite a heroic sense of adventure), but scraped my shin on a fallen log and ran into a tree with bark on it that felt like a gigantic currycomb--and stopped! Up to this point I think I was still partly asleep.

Now, however, I waked up.
"All you need," said I to myself in my most matter-of-fact tone, "is a little cool sense.