It was so dark now, I was so completely enveloped in thickest blackness, that I could not have seen even a stone wall had it been in front of me; but it would have been some consolation, some reassurance, only to have felt it when I stretched out my hand before me; instead of that, however, when I extended my arm it went groping about helplessly in illimitable space. The storm appeared to be finding a cruel pleasure in playing me all sorts of unkind tricks, for now it flung the folds of my mantle over my head, and now it poured a waterspout down my back. The ground under my feet was growing every minute more swampy, and sometimes I sank in ankle deep; two or three times I found that, by way of a little change, I had stepped into a gutter, which caused a refreshing shower of muddy water to come splashing upward to meet and mingle in friendly amity with the raindrops that pelted down from above. The sprites of earth and air may possibly have found much satisfaction in this meeting, but most decidedly I did not, nor did my luckless petticoats and stockings. All at once I found myself making a most undignified descent from an upright position; I had stumbled over some object which was lying in my way. There was no saving my untrustworthy feet; the next instant I was lying prostrate on the dripping grass, with my head in what seemed to be a shallow puddle. I was going to try to pick myself up again as quickly as I could, when there rose around me a series of long-drawn-out, horrid, incomprehensible sounds, each of which appeared to strike a rough note in a discordant gamut, while in among them there was a tumultuous, confused jangle of bells, as if a hundred tambourines were ringing together. Then there came a sensation of having my face swept with a drenched mop that was composed of very long, shaggy hair, and was passed and re-passed over my cheeks and forehead, and used my eyes and mouth in a most unpleasantly free-and-easy fashion, and after that I was trampled upon by a succession of small, but by no means airy feet—a process which it is far more agreeable to describe than to feel. This over, there followed a noise of scampering and rushing and hurrying across the common, until footsteps and bells all died away in the far distance, mingling with the chorus of the storm.