After riding for an hour or two over the desolate level, I descended through rattling oaks to the bed of a stream, and then ascended through rattling oaks to the prairie beyond.  Here, however, I took the wrong road, and found myself, some three miles farther, at a farm-house, where it terminated.  “You kin go out over the perairah yander,” said the farmer, dropping his maul beside a rail he had just split off,—­“there’s a plain trail from Sykes’s that’ll bring you onto the road not fur from Sugar Crick.”  With which knowledge I plucked up heart and rode on.

What with the windings and turnings of the various cart-tracks, the family resemblance in the groves of oak and hickory, and the heavy, uniform gray of the sky, I presently lost my compass-needle,—­that natural instinct of direction, on which I had learned to rely.  East, west, north, south,—­all were alike, and the very doubt paralyzed the faculty.  The growing darkness of the sky, the watery moaning of the wind, betokened night and storm; but I pressed on, hap-hazard, determined, at least, to reach one of the incipient villages on the Bloomington road.

After an hour more, I found myself on the brink of another winding hollow, threaded by a broad, shallow stream.  On the opposite side, a quarter of a mile above, stood a rough shanty, at the foot of the rise which led to the prairie.  After fording the stream, however, I found that the trail I had followed continued forward in the same direction, leaving this rude settlement on the left.  On the opposite side of the hollow, the prairie again stretched before me, dark and flat, and destitute of any sign of habitation.  I could scarcely distinguish the trail any longer; in half an hour, I knew, I should be swallowed up in a gulf of impenetrable darkness; and there was evidently no choice left me but to return to the lonely shanty, and there seek shelter for the night.

To be thwarted in one’s plans, even by wind or weather, is always vexatious; but in this case, the prospect of spending a night in such a dismal corner of the world was especially disagreeable.  I am—­or at least I consider myself—­a thoroughly matter-of-fact man, and my first thought, I am not ashamed to confess, was of oysters.  Visions of a favorite saloon, and many a pleasant supper with Dunham and Beeson, (my partners,) all at once popped into my mind, as I turned back over the brow of the hollow and urged Peck down its rough slope.  “Well,” thought I, at last, “this will be one more story for our next meeting.  Who knows what originals I may not find, even in a solitary settler’s shanty?”