I felt a sudden lift and thrill of the spirits, a warm sense that this too was part of the great adventure--the Thing Itself.
"This is the light," I said looking up again at the sky and the single bright star, "which is set for me to-night.

I will make my bed by it." I can hope to make no one understand (unless he understands already) with what joy of adventure I now crept through the meadow toward the wood.

It was an unknown, unexplored world I was in, and I, the fortunate discoverer, had here to shift for himself, make his home under the stars! Marquette on the wild shores of the Mississippi, or Stanley in Africa, had no joy that I did not know at that moment.
I crept along the meadow and came at last to the wood.

Here I chose a somewhat sheltered spot at the foot of a large tree--and yet a spot not so obscured that I could not look out over the open spaces of the meadow and see the sky.

Here, groping in the darkness, like some primitive creature, I raked together a pile of leaves with my fingers, and found dead twigs and branches of trees; but in that moist forest (where the rain had fallen only the day before) my efforts to kindle a fire were unavailing.