On one hand it was soon bounded
by the acclivity of the hill, while the lake, on the other, served
as a guide. For two hours did this single-hearted and simple-minded
girl toil through the mazes of the forest, sometimes finding herself
on the brow of the bank that bounded the water, and at others
struggling up an ascent that warned her to go no farther in that
direction, since it necessarily ran at right angles to the course
on which she wished to proceed. Her feet often slid from beneath
her, and she got many falls, though none to do her injury; but, by
the end of the period mentioned, she had become so weary as to want
strength to go any farther. Rest was indispensable, and she set
about preparing a bed, with the readiness and coolness of one to
whom the wilderness presented no unnecessary terrors. She knew
that wild beasts roamed through all the adjacent forest, but animals
that preyed on the human species were rare, and of dangerous serpents
there were literally none. These facts had been taught her by her
father, and whatever her feeble mind received at all, it received
so confidingly as to leave her no uneasiness from any doubts,
or scepticism. To her the sublimity of the solitude in which she
was placed, was soothing, rather than appalling, and she gathered
a bed of leaves, with as much indifference to the circumstances that
would have driven the thoughts of sleep entirely from the minds of
most of her sex, as if she had been preparing her place of nightly
rest beneath the paternal roof.
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