Long, however, it did not last:  I could not have been twenty miles from Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point:  and at once callousness changed to terror within me.  But even as I plied the brake, I felt that it was too late:  I rushed to the gangway to make a wild leap down an embankment to the right, but was thrown backward by a quick series of rough bumps, caused by eight or ten cattle which lay there across the lines:  and when I picked myself up, and leapt, some seconds before the impact, the speed must have considerably slackened, for I received no fracture, but lay in semi-coma in a patch of yellow-flowered whin on level ground, and was even conscious of a fire on the lines forty yards away, and, all the night, of vague thunder sounding from somewhere.

* * * * *

About five, or half-past, in the morning I was sitting up, rubbing my eyes, in a dim light mixed with drizzle.  I could see that the train of my last night’s debauch was a huddled-up chaos of fallen carriages and disfigured bodies.  A five-barred gate on my left opened into a hedge, and swung with creaks:  two yards from my feet lay a little shaggy pony with swollen wan abdomen, the very picture of death, and also about me a number of dead wet birds.

I picked myself up, passed through the gate, and walked up a row of trees to a house at their end.  I found it to be a little country-tavern with a barn, forming one house, the barn part much larger than the tavern part.  I went into the tavern by a small side-door—­behind the bar—­into a parlour—­up a little stair—­into two rooms:  but no one was there.  I then went round into the barn, which was paved with cobble-stones, and there lay a dead mare and foal, some fowls, with two cows.  A ladder-stair led to a closed trap-door in the floor above.  I went up, and in the middle of a wilderness of hay saw nine people—­labourers, no doubt—­five men and four women, huddled together, and with them a tin-pail containing the last of some spirit; so that these had died merry.

I slept three hours among them, and afterwards went back to the tavern, and had some biscuits of which I opened a new tin, with some ham, jam and apples, of which I made a good meal, for my pemmican was gone.

Afterwards I went following the rail-track on foot, for the engines of both the collided trains were smashed.  I knew northward from southward by the position of the sun:  and after a good many stoppages at houses, and by railway-banks, I came, at about eleven in the night, to a great and populous town.