It was winter—­it was night.  It would be necessary to walk several leagues before a human habitation could be reached.

He did not know where he was.

He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the brink of the sea had gone away without him.

He felt himself put outside the pale of life.

He felt that man failed him.

He was ten years old.

The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night rising and depths where he heard the waves murmur.

He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.

Then suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off his numbness—­with the agility of a squirrel, or perhaps of an acrobat—­he turned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff.  He escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous.  He was hurrying landward, just as though he had a destination marked out; nevertheless he was going nowhere.

He hastened without an object—­a fugitive before Fate.

To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that of an animal—­he did both.  As the slopes of Portland face southward, there was scarcely any snow on the path; the intensity of cold had, however, frozen that snow into dust very troublesome to the walker.  The child freed himself of it.  His man’s jacket, which was too big for him, complicated matters, and got in his way.  Now and then on an overhanging crag or in a declivity he came upon a little ice, which caused him to slip down.  Then, after hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catch hold of a dry branch or projecting stone.  Once he came on a vein of slate, which suddenly gave way under him, letting him down with it.  Crumbling slate is treacherous.  For some seconds the child slid like a tile on a roof; he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft of grass which he clutched at the right moment saved him.  He was as mute in sight of the abyss as he had been in sight of the men; he gathered himself up and re-ascended silently.  The slope was steep; so he had to tack in ascending.  The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical rock had no ending.  It receded before the child in the distance of its height.  As the child ascended, so seemed the summit to ascend.  While he clambered he looked up at the dark entablature placed like a barrier between heaven and him.  At last he reached the top.

He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for he rose from the precipice.

Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver.  He felt in his face that bite of the night, the north wind.  The bitter north-wester was blowing; he tightened his rough sailor’s jacket about his chest.

It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou-’wester, because that sort of stuff allows little of the south-westerly rain to penetrate.

The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed his feet firmly on the frozen ground, and looked about him.