He was so sleepy, so tired out and out, that from very weariness he forgot that he was hungry and athirst. Yet, in some strange fantastic way, the thought, despite his weariness, prevented him from sleeping--that the winds which whistled through the night were the winds of God. The winds of God! And it seemed to him that all things were of God, the darkness and the solitude, and the mysterious place. Who shall judge him? Who shall say that it was only because he was in trouble that he had such thoughts? It is something even if in times of trouble we think of God. "God is a very present help in times of trouble," has been written on some page of some old book. Bertie was so curiously impressed by a sense of the presence of the Almighty God that he did what he had not done for a very long time--he got up, and kneeling at the foot of the friendly tree, he prayed. And it is not altogether beyond the range of possibility that, when he again sought rest, it was because of his prayer that God sent sleep unto his eyes. Chapter XXII THE END OF THE JOURNEY Throughout the day which followed, and throughout the night, and throughout the succeeding days and nights, Bertie wandered among the wilds of Finistere, and among its lanes and villages. How he lived he himself could have scarcely told. The misfortunes which had befallen him since he had set out on his journey to the Land of Golden Dreams had told upon him. He became ill in body and in mind. He needed rest and care, good food and careful nursing. What he got was no food, or scarcely any, strange skies to shelter him, a strange land to serve him as his bed. It was fortunate that summer was at hand. Had it been winter he would have lain down at night, and in the morning they would have found him dead. But he was at least spared excessive cold. The winds were not invariably genial. The occasional rain was not at all times welcome--to him at least, whatever it might have been to the thirsty earth--but there was no frost. If frost had come he would certainly have died. What he ate he scarcely knew. Throughout the whole of his wanderings he never received food from any human being. He found his breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper in the fields and on the hedges. A patch of turnips was a godsend. There was one field in particular in which grew both swedes and turnips. It was within a stone's-throw of a village; to reach it from the road you had to scramble down a bank. To this he returned again and again. He began to look upon it almost as his own.