In vain. It requires education to become accustomed to a bed of stones. All things come by custom, but those who are used to sheets find stony soil disagreeable ground. Bertie gave it up. The wind seemed to come through the chinks in the wall with even greater bitterness than if there had been no wall at all. The stones were torture. There was nothing on which he could lay his head. So he got up and struck across the field, seeking for a sheltered place in which to lie. For another hour or so he wandered on, now sitting down for a moment or two, now kneeling, and feeling about with his hand for comfortable ground. In an open country, on a dark and windy night, it is weary searching for one's bed, especially in a country where stones are more plentiful than grass. In his fruitless wanderings, confused by the darkness and the strangeness of the place, Bertie went over the same ground more than once. Without knowing it, meaning to go forwards, he went back. When he suspected that this was the case, his helplessness came home to him more forcibly than it had done before. What was he to do if he could not tell the way he had come from the way he was going? At last he blundered on some trees. He welcomed them as though they had been friends. He sat down at the foot of one, and found that the ground was coated by what was either moss or grass. Compared to his bed of stones it was like a bed of eider-down. It was quite a big tree, and he found that he could so lean against it that it would serve as a very tolerable barrier against the wind at his back. At the foot of this tree he sat down, and pillowing his head against the trunk he sought for sleep. But sleep was coy, and would not come on being wooed. The utter solitude of his position kept him wakeful. Robinson Crusoe's desolation was scarcely more complete; his helplessness was not so great. It came upon Bertie, as it came upon Crusoe in his lonely island, that he was wholly in the hands of God. The teachings which he had been taught at his mother's knee, and which seemed to go into one ear and out of the other, proved to be the bread which is cast upon the waters, returning after many days. He remembered with startling vividness how his mother had told him that God holds us all in the hollow of His hand: he understood the meaning of that saying now.