The night had no other adventure.  The moon at length coming up behind the clouds lent a spectral aspect to the forest, and deceived us for a time into the notion that day was at hand; but the rain never ceased, and we lay wishful and waiting, with no item of solid misery wanting that we could conceive.

Day was slow a-coming, and didn’t amount to much when it came, so heavy were the clouds; but the rain slackened.  We crawled out of our water-cure “pack,” and sought the guide.  To our infinite relief he announced himself not only alive, but in a going condition.  I looked at my watch.  It had stopped at five o’clock.  I poured the water out of it, and shook it; but, not being constructed on the hydraulic principle, it refused to go.  Some hours later we encountered a huntsman, from whom I procured some gun-grease; with this I filled the watch, and heated it in by the fire.  This is a most effectual way of treating a delicate Genevan timepiece.

The light disclosed fully the suspected fact that our bed had been made in a slight depression:  the under rubber blanket spread in this had prevented the rain from soaking into the ground, and we had been lying in what was in fact a well-contrived bathtub.  While Old Phelps was pulling himself together, and we were wringing some gallons of water out of our blankets, we questioned the old man about the “squawk,” and what bird was possessed of such a voice.  It was not a bird at all, he said, but a cat, the black-cat of the woods, larger than the domestic animal, and an ugly customer, who is fond of fish, and carries a pelt that is worth two or three dollars in the market.  Occasionally he blunders into a sable-trap; and he is altogether hateful in his ways, and has the most uncultivated voice that is heard in the woods.  We shall remember him as one of the least pleasant phantoms of that cheerful night when we lay in the storm, fearing any moment the advent to one of us of the grimmest messenger.

We rolled up and shouldered our wet belongings, and, before the shades had yet lifted from the saturated bushes, pursued our march.  It was a relief to be again in motion, although our progress was slow, and it was a question every rod whether the guide could go on.  We had the day before us; but if we did not find a boat at the inlet a day might not suffice, in the weak condition of the guide, to extricate us from our ridiculous position.  There was nothing heroic in it; we had no object:  it was merely, as it must appear by this time, a pleasure excursion, and we might be lost or perish in it without reward and with little sympathy.  We had something like a hour and a half of stumbling through the swamp when suddenly we stood in the little trail!  Slight as it was, it appeared to us a very Broadway to Paradise if broad ways ever lead thither.  Phelps hailed it and sank down in it like one reprieved from death.  But the boat?  Leaving him, we quickly ran a quarter of a mile down to the inlet.  The boat was there.