Then, after looking in vain for the beacon light, the danger of my situation struck me, and I halted.
"I am certain to go wrong," I said to myself.
"It is out of my power to follow a direct course without something to serve as a compass.

I will go back to the village and wait till morning." Wheeling about in my tracks, I resumed my wearisome tramp through the heavy snow, and kept it up until I was certain I had travelled fully a fourth of a mile.

Then when I paused a moment and gazed ahead and around, I was confronted by blank darkness on every hand.

What a proof of a man's tendency to go wrong, that in aiming at a village of fifty dwellings, and only a fourth of a mile away, I had missed it altogether! This discovery gave me my first thrill of real alarm.

I shouted, but my voice fell dead in the snowy air.