It made you want to tear all your clothes off and play at savages, instead of keeping respectable in your boots.
But we had to bear the boots because it was so brambly.
It was Oswald who showed the others how flat it would be to go home the same way we came; and he pointed out the telegraph wires in the distance and said-- 'There must be a road there, let's make for it,' which was quite a simple and ordinary thing to say, and he does not ask for any credit for it.

So we sloshed along, scratching our legs with the brambles, and the water squelched in our boots, and Alice's blue muslin frock was torn all over in those crisscross tears which are considered so hard to darn.
We did not follow the stream any more.

It was only a trickle now, so we knew we had tracked it to its source.

And we got hotter and hotter and hotter, and the dews of agony stood in beads on our brows and rolled down our noses and off our chins.

And the flies buzzed, and the gnats stung, and Oswald bravely sought to keep up Dicky's courage, when he tripped on a snag and came down on a bramble bush, by saying-- 'You see it IS the source of the Nile we've discovered.