For a time he sat still and listened. He has confided to a friend since that he could 'hear the silence.' Certainly he could hear nothing else, unless it were the sudden creaking of some old tree's bough weighted with too much snow. And then his thoughts went after the madman. A thought struck him, and even Snap never fancied that it was the cold alone which made his knees knock together and his teeth rattle so. What if, now that he was alone, the madman should turn the tables and hunt him? Was not that him he saw sneaking over the snow in the dim light of the rising moon? Snap sprang to his feet with a crackle, accounted for by the fact that part of his clothing had frozen to the log on which he had been sitting, and had elected to remain there. Snap put his hand ruefully behind him. It was very cold even with clothes, it would be colder without! However, as he rose the shadow moved rapidly away, taking the semblance of a dog to Snap's eyes as it went. By-and-by a long blood-curdling howl told the boy that the shadow he had seen was sitting somewhere not far off, complaining to the moon that the plump English lad wasn't half dead yet, and looked too big for one poor hungry wolf to tackle all alone. 'Confound these forests,' thought Snap, 'and all the brutes in them, their voices alone are enough to frighten a fellow,' and then he began to wonder if he would soon go to sleep and never wake any more, and hoped, if so, that Nares would find him and send a message home to Fairbury. At any rate the boy thought, before going to sleep for the last time, he would keep up the practice he had observed all his life, and for a few minutes the hoary pine-trees and the cold, distant stars looked down on an English boy bending his knees to the only power in Heaven or earth to which it is no shame for the bravest and proudest to bend. Like a son to a father he prayed, just asking for what he wanted, and pretty confident that, if it would not be a bad thing for him, he would get it. When he rose to his feet the forest seemed to have put on a more friendly air, the trees didn't look so rigid and funereal, the stars were not so far off. Who knows, perhaps Nature, God's creation, had also heard the boy's prayer to their common Creator. For hours and hours, it seemed to him, Snap tramped up and down, like a sentry on his beat, beneath the pine at whose foot lay his unlit fire. After a while he began to dream as he walked, for surely it was a dream! Somewhere not far off from him he could hear a human voice, and hear it moreover so distinctly that the words of the song it sang came clearly to his ears. Snap shook himself and pinched himself violently to be sure he was awake, and then stood still again to listen. Yes, there was no mistake at all about it. Hush-a-by, baby, on the tree-top, When the wind blows the cradle will rock,