This may be justly esteemed a truly wonderful exploit, and it exceeds that of the great Daniel Boone of Kentucky, of whom it is related that he ran before a band of wild Indians the same distance, or thereabouts, in _four_ days' time; but it must be remembered that I was fleeing from a raging madman, whose speed was so nearly equal to my own, that if I chanced but to flag a little in my exertions at any time, I was sure to see him make his appearance on the rear, or to hear his voice screaming on the winds to "stop his mummy." Indeed, I ran with such haste, that I took no note of the road upon which I travelled, and to this day I am ignorant how I succeeded in passing the three great rivers, the Potomac, the Chesapeake, and the Delaware, which lay in my route, and which I _must_ have crossed in some way or other. And, for the same reason, I am ignorant in what manner I sustained existence during those three days, having not the slightest recollection of eating a single meal on the whole journey. All that I can remember of the journey is, that I ran I knew not whither, but with an instinctive turning of my face towards the north; that I was closely followed by the German doctor; and that, about sundown on the third day, I found myself, to my unspeakable joy, rushing through the Owl-roost swamp, across the meadow, and by that identical beech-tree where I had first lost my body, in full view of my own house. The sight of that once happy home of my childhood filled me with rapture. I rushed towards it, hailed by a shout from old Jim Jumble, my negro-man, backed by another from his wife Dinah, that might have waked the dead, they were so loud and uproarious, and found myself in the arms of my dear, but long-neglected sister Prudence, who, with her husband Alderwood, and her three young children, was standing on the porch. Then, being wholly overcome by exhaustion of body and mind, and having endured such fatigues and sufferings from hunger and thirst, without speaking of terror, as have seldom oppressed a poor feeble human being, I fell into a swoon, from which I awoke only to be assailed by a violent fever and delirium, the direct consequences of my superhuman exertions, that kept me a-bed, in a condition between life and death, for more than two weeks.