Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441, page 49 by Various Authors
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German, asking my way.
'Follow on by the foot of the wood, and you'll get there in time,' was the reply, at length faintly heard in the distance, and the cart rumbled heavily away again, leaving me just as wise as before; for which was head and which was foot of the wood I knew no more than the child unborn. Yet I feared to dash through the intervening corn in the direction of the receding and already distant cart, neither knowing what the nature of the intermediate ground might prove, nor whether, supposing it practicable in the dark, such an infringement of rural property might not lead to disagreeable consequences, and in nowise further me in the attainment of the piece of knowledge which I stood so much in need of. So, I took on chance to my left hand, as the most distant from the finger-post I had fallen upon an hour and a half before.
The sound of the cart which long tingled in my ears, and the utter disappointment of my suddenly raised hopes, only rendered my sense of solitude and helplessness more intense. Indeed, I sometimes almost doubted whether the whole thing--cart and carter, or, rather, rumbling wheels and faint, chilling, distant voice--might not have been the delusion of my reeling brain, debilitated by overfatigue and long fasting (for every one knows the early hour at which a German dinner takes place); and on subsequent inquiry, I could not hear of any cart having passed in that quarter at all.
It was singular how long I wandered about, and every now and then in cultivated districts, without hearing a single human voice even in the earlier portion of the evening--nay, any sound whatever, save once or twice the fierce warning bark of a shepherd's dog, when I had inadvertently approached too near a sheepfold--the startling rush of some affrighted bird in the wood, flapping wildly up through the foliage--a distant village clock in some indefinite direction over the hill-top--or, finally, as on one occasion, a few remote shots, which I at first fancied