Now, when matters have become very bad, any change for the better, however slight it be, imparts some cheering influence; and the relief our drenched pedestrians felt from the mere ceasing of the rain, and exchanging the dull lowering sky for the clear dark-blue starlight, proved enough to renovate their drooping hearts, and to excite them to make the best use they could of their limbs; so that by persevering they at last reached a part of the waste where the travelling became less irksome, the drifting sand having, in this particular part, formed itself into larger hills, which, in course of time, had become coated with short grass, and thus afforded very pleasant ground to walk over. But this relief from fatigue was attended with increased peril to the erring wanderers, who were now in the very midst of abandoned mines, whose shafts yawned around them in every direction, many of which they passed almost within a hair's-breadth of, unaware of the dangers that thus lay in their path, and only congratulating themselves on the improved state of the ground they had to walk over. Now Vernon Wycherley, who had been for some short time turning the matter over in his mind, began to fancy he had found a poser for his fellow-traveller, to whom he remarked, that however fortunate they might consider themselves when they got out of their present difficulties, there could be no possible advantage whatever in their having gotten into them. "I don't agree with you even there," said Frank; "one advantage there will be on the score of experience, as it cannot fail to furnish us with an accurate knowledge of what a person's sensations are when he loses his way in a wilderness of sandbanks in a dark and stormy night in November." "And is that all the advantage you can point out?" interposed Mr Vernon Wycherley. "All? No, not one-half," resumed Frank. "Will it not supply both of us with everlasting materials for spinning yarns to match other travellers' tales, as well as furnish you with an endless topic for your poetic and dramatic pen? And besides, I've no doubt there are lots of other advantages we shall eventually derive benefit from, though they may for ever remain hidden amongst the many mysteries that man is never designed to know."