“On the third day they continued their journey down the brook, which, growing wider and wider, inclined them to think it was the head of some extensive river, and they hoped it would prove to be that of the Thames. The violence of the storm began to subside about noon, but without any abatement of the cold, or cessation of the rain, which continued to fall during the whole of the day. A little before sunset they fired at a partridge, but unfortunately missed it. Three charges of powder and shot were now all that remained. Still hope, with its sustaining influence, prevented their hearts from sinking within them, and still did they expect a speedy termination of their toils and sufferings. But another joyless night found them waking in all its watches, and another sunless morning saluted them,—the victims of despair. “On the fourth day, they felt excessively hungry and weak; their thirst also was insatiable, being compelled every five or six minutes to drink. In the afternoon, their hunger increased to such a degree, that they could have eaten any thing except human flesh. Sixty hours had now elapsed without their having tasted food of any kind, and the appalling idea of suffering by starvation for the first time obtruded itself. Before the close of the day, however, they succeeded in shooting a partridge, one-half of which they imprudently ate as their supper, and feasted on the remainder at breakfast the ensuing morning,—thus fulfilling the scriptural injunction in a sense in which it was not conveyed, “Take no thought for the morrow.” They declared their hunger was no more appeased by eating this bird, than it would have been, at a more fortunate period of their lives, by swallowing a cherry! Little more than one charge of powder was now left; and this they resolved to preserve for lighting fires, knowing, as the frost had again set in, that if they were exposed for a single night to the weather, without the protection of a fire, they must inevitably perish. “The fifth night proved extremely cold, and Nowlan perceived, in the morning, that his feet were badly frozen. Pitiable as their situation was before this heart-rending event, it then became still more wretched. This unfortunate man had now to endure a complication of unprecedented sufferings. To the imperative hankerings of hunger, which he could not satisfy, a continual thirst, which he could not appease, a violent fever, which seemed not to abate, and the “pelting of the pitiless storm,” from which he had no shelter, there was added a species of torment the most excruciating that human nature is doomed to suffer. Until this deplorable event, they had travelled at least fifty miles a day, walking, or, as they expressed it, running from before sunrise until after sunset. They were now unable to perform more than half their accustomed journey, and even that with the utmost difficulty.