the crest of the mountain and began to descend.  I felt with my foot before me, and when the foot could find nothing to rest on I drew it back and moved sidewise till I found a step down, hanging on all the time to the branches of the trees.  I descended in this way a long distance, then came to a marsh which I recognized only by the croaking of the frogs in it; and, skirting the sound, made my way past it, always keeping the general direction through the divergences made necessary by the nature of the land.

At length I got through the fog and came to an open field, beyond which I saw the outlines of trees against the clouded sky, and, keeping on, came to a road.  A few yards further on a light was visible in a roadside cottage, and other houses were near, but all dark, as it was late and all in them were asleep.  I knocked at the door where I saw the light and asked the way to Hancock.  “Why, you are in Hancock,” the man of the house replied; and, on my inquiry as to an inn, he informed me that a hundred yards further on there was an inn, to which I went.  The rain had ceased, but I was soaking, and I asked for a fire by which to dry my clothes, and a bed, both of which were quickly prepared; and then the landlord asked me where I came from and by what road.  When I told him that I came from Pittsfield by the mountain, he exclaimed in amazement, “Why, there is no place by which a white man could come over in broad daylight;” an exaggeration, as I could testify, but it proved that the passage was held to be dangerous to the ordinary foot traveler.  The incident in itself has no importance, but the singular feeling under which I made the passage of a trackless mountain, in complete darkness for the most difficult part of the way, in perfect confidence in a mysterious guidance which justified that confidence, was a mental phenomenon worthy of note, the more that it was in keeping with the invariable feeling which had grown up in me from the cogitations of years.  As I am telling the story of my life, and the spiritual influences of my early years are an essential part of that life, it cannot be irrelevant to the general result that I should show how the springs of it acted.  While I was on the wood road in the earlier portion of the walk, I followed unhesitatingly the visible path and made no question of guidance; but, when thrown on the occult influence in which I confided, I walked unerringly to my destination with the precision of an animal which nature had never deserted.  In the subsequent years, of which a great part was always spent in the wilderness, the fascination of which became absorbing, this occult faculty strengthened, so that I was never at a loss, when in the trackless forest, for my path homeward.  I then thought it a newly acquired faculty.  I now regard it as simply a recovered one, inherent in all healthy minds, but lost, as many others have been, in civilization.