John Jay might have slept on all night had not a leaf fluttered slowly down from the tree above, and brushed across his face.  He opened his eyes, looking all around him in a bewildered way.  Then he sat up, and peered through the bushes.  A cold perspiration covered him when he realized that it was dusk and that he was in the middle of the gander thicket.  He snatched up the blackberries, a pail in each hand, and stood looking helplessly around him, for he could not decide which way to go.  In front of him stretched half a mile of the haunted thicket.  It was either to push his way through that as quickly as possible, or to go back by the long, lonesome road over which he had come.

Just then a harmless flock of geese belonging to an old market-gardener who lived near came waddling up from the creek, on the way home to their barn-yard.  They moved along in a silent procession, pushing their long, thin necks through the underbrush.  John Jay was too terrified to see that their heads were properly in place, and that they were as harmless as the flock that fed in Aunt Susan’s dooryard.

“They’ll get me!  They’ll get me!” he whimpered, as they came nearer and nearer, for his feet seemed so heavy that he could not lift them when he tried to run.  Made desperate by his fear, he raised first one pail of berries and then the other, hurling them at the startled geese with all the force his wiry little arms could muster.

Instantly their long white wings shot up through the bushes.  There was an angry fluttering and hissing, as half running, half flying, they waddled faster towards home.  John Jay did not look to see what direction they were taking.  He was sure they were after him.  He could hear their long wings flapping just behind him; at least, he thought he could, but the noise he heard was the snapping of the twigs he trampled in his headlong flight.  No greyhound ever bounded through a wood with lighter feet than those which carried him.  His eyes were wide with fright.  His heart beat so hard in his throat he thought he would surely die before he could reach the cabin.  At every step the light seemed to be growing dimmer and the thicket denser, although he thought he certainly must have been running long enough to have reached the clearing.  Still he ran on, and on, and on.  The recollection of one of Mammy’s stories flashed across his mind.

[Illustration:  The ganders had chased him around]

Once a man had lost his way in this wood, and the ganders had chased him around and around until daylight.  The thought made him so weak in the knees that he was ready to drop from fright and exhaustion.  Then he recalled a superstition that he had often heard, that anyone who has lost his way may find it again by turning his pocket wrong side out.  He was twitching at his with trembling hands, looking with eyes too frightened to see, and fumbling with fingers too stiff with fear to feel, but the pocket seemed to have disappeared.  “It’s conju’ed too,” he wailed, as he ran heedlessly on.