Impatient of waiting longer, and converting myself to the false belief that the light was really coming in what turned out to be the west, I did battle in the dark with the last four miles of the journey. All went well until I reached a certain point in the road, which was now well defined through the trees. There every time I brought up in a clump of bushes and lost the track. Back, time after time, I went, seeking with careful calculation to make a fresh and truer start, only to bring up again in brambles and briers. When the light did come, I had, for two hundred yards, in this going and coming, beaten a path in the snow which looked as if travelled over for a week. Daylight showed what a ridiculously trifling turn had caused me thus to miss the route. The moral of which is that man’s welfare is often wrecked on some trifling error. A failure to say, “Good morning” to an acquaintance, a long, gloomy countenance or putting one’s knife in the mouth, or guzzling down soup or coffee with undue noise, has repelled one man from another, and such repulsion has sent our fortunes on the wrong track altogether. I was welcomed at the Strawberry House by six hounds, who, in the still faint light, made at me as they would at another beast, and the first few moments of my arrival on this outpost of civilization was occupied in energetic attempts to keep what was left of me from being eaten by the dogs. Indeed, the way of the transgressor is hard. I had never injured these dogs. However, the hospitality I experienced at Palmer’s stood out in bold relief against the churlishness of their brute creation. CHAPTER XXIX. ON THE ROSTRUM.