145.  Partly from misinformation, and partly from miscalculation, I had lost my way; and, quite alone, but armed with my sword and a brace of pistols, to defend myself against the bears, I arrived at the log-house in the middle of a moonlight night, the hoar frost covering the trees and the grass.  A stout and clamorous dog, kept off by the gleaming of my sword, waked the master of the house, who got up, received me with great hospitality, got me something to eat, and put me into a feather-bed, a thing that I had been a stranger to for some years.  I, being very tired, had tried to pass the night in the woods, between the trunks of two large trees, which had fallen side by side, and within a yard of each other.  I had made a nest for myself of dry fern, and had made a covering by laying boughs of spruce across the trunks of the trees.  But unable to sleep on account of the cold; becoming sick from the great quantity of water that I had drank during the heat of the day, and being, moreover, alarmed at the noise of the bears, and lest one of them should find me in a defenceless state, I had roused myself up, and had crept along as well as I could.  So that no hero of eastern romance ever experienced a more enchanting change.

146.  I had got into the house of one of those YANKEE LOYALISTS, who, at the close of the revolutionary war (which, until it had succeeded, was called a rebellion) had accepted of grants of land in the King’s Province of New Brunswick; and who, to the great honour of England, had been furnished with all the means of making new and comfortable settlements.  I was suffered to sleep till breakfast time, when I found a table, the like of which I have since seen so many in the United States, loaded with good things.  The master and the mistress of the house, aged about fifty, were like what an English farmer and his wife were half a century ago.  There were two sons, tall and stout, who appeared to have come in from work, and the youngest of whom was about my age, then twenty-three.  But there was another member of the family, aged nineteen, who (dressed according to the neat and simple fashion of New England, whence she had come with her parents five or six years before) had her long light-brown hair twisted nicely up, and fastened on the top of her head, in which head were a pair of lively blue eyes, associated with features of which that softness and that sweetness, so characteristic of American girls, were the predominant expressions, the whole being set off by a complexion indicative of glowing health, and forming, figure, movements, and all taken together, an assemblage of beauties, far surpassing any that I had ever seen but once in my life.  That once was, too, two years agone; and, in such a case and at such an age, two years, two whole years, is a long, long while!  It was a space as long as the eleventh part of my then life!  Here was the present against the absent:  here was the power of the eyes