On top of this fairy mountain, at the roots of the trees that crowned it, hidden by bracken and undergrowth, was the round hole from which I had plunged; nor need I tell you how, remembering what had happened in there, I rubbed my eyes, and laughed, and marveled greatly at the will of the Inscrutable, which had given me so wonderful a rebirth.
To you must be left to fill up the picture of my sensations and slowly recurring faculties. How I lay and basked in the warmth, and slowly remembered everything: to me belongs but the strange and simple narrative.
One of my first active desires was for breakfast—nor, as my previous meal had been four centuries earlier, will I apologize for this weakness. But where and how should it be had? This question soon answered itself. Sauntering hither and thither, the low shoulder of the ridge was presently crossed, and a narrow footway in the woods leading to some pleasant pastures entered upon. Before I had gone far up this shady track, a pail of milk in her hand, and whistling a ditty to herself, came tripping toward me as pretty a maid as had ever twisted a bit of white hawthorn into her amber hair.
I let her approach, and then, stepping out, made the most respectful salutation within the knowledge of ancient British courtesy. But, alas! my appearance was against me, and Roman fancies had peopled the hills with jolly satyrs, for one of which, no doubt, the damsel took me. As I bowed low the dust of centuries cracked all down my back. I was tawny and grim, and unshaved, and completely naked—though I had forgotten it—and even my excellent manners could not warrant my disingenuousness against such a damning appearance. She screamed with fear, and, letting go her milk-jar, turned and fled, with a nimbleness which would have left even the hot old wood-god himself far in the rear.
However, the milk remained, and peering into the pitcher, here seemed the very thing to recuperate me by easy stages. So I retired to a cozy dell, and, between copious draughts of that fine natural liquor, overwhelmed with blessings the sleek kine and the comely maid who milked them. Indeed, the stuff ran into my withered processes like a freshet stream into a long-dry country; it consoled and satisfied me; and afterward I slept as an infant all that night and far into another sun.
The next day brought several needs with it. The chief of these were more food, more clothes, and a profession (since fate seemed determined to make me take another space of existence upon the world). All three were satisfied eventually. As for the first two, I was not particular as to fashion or diet, and easily supplied them. In the course of a morning stroll a shepherd’s hut was discovered, and on approaching it cautiously the little shed turned out to be empty. However, the owner had left several sheepskin mantles and rough homespun clothes on pegs round the walls, and to these I helped myself sufficiently to convert an unclothed caveman into a passable yeoman. Also, I made free with his store of oat-cakes and coarse cheese, putting all not needed back upon his shelf.
Here I was again, fed and clothed, but what to do next was the question. To consider the knotty matter, after spending most of the day in purposeless wandering, I went up to the top of my own hill—the one that, unknown to every one, had the cavern in it—and there pondered the subject long. The whole face of the country perplexed me. It was certainly Britain, but Britain so amplified and altered as to be hardly recognizable. Wide fields were everywhere, broad roads traversed the hills and valleys with impartial straightness, the great woodlands of the earlier times were gone, or much curtailed, while wonderful white buildings shone here and there among the foliage, and down away in the west, by a river, the sunbeams glinted on the roofs and temple fronts of a fine, unknown town. That was the place, it seemed to me at length, to refit for another voyage on the strange sea of chance; but I was too experienced in the ways of the world to travel cityward with an empty wallet. While meditating upon the manner in which this deficiency might be met, the golden store of coins left in the cave below suddenly presented themselves. The very thing! And, as heavy purple clouds were piling up round the presently sinking sun, earth and sky alike presaging a storm that evening, the cavern would be a convenient place to sleep in.
Finding the entrance with some difficulty, and noticing, but with no special attention, that it looked a little larger than when last seen, my first need was fire. This I had to make for myself. In the pouch of the shepherd’s jerkin was a length of rough twine; this would do for matches, while as a torch a resinous pine branch, bruised and split, served well enough. Fixing one end of the string to a bush, I took a turn round a dry stick, and then began laboriously rubbing backward and forward. In half an hour the string fumed pleasantly, and, something under the hour—one was nothing if not patient in that age—it charred and burst into flame.
Just as the evening set in, and the earth opened its pores to the first round drops of the warm-smelling rain that pattered on the young forest leaves, and the thunder began to murmur distantly under the purple mantle of the coming storm, my torch spluttering and hissing, I entered the vast gloomy chamber of my sleep, and, not without a sense of awe, stole up along the walls a hundred yards or more, to my strange couch.
The coins were safe, and shining greenly in their earthen jar; so, sticking the light into a cleft, I poured them on to the sand, and then commenced to tuck the stuff away, as fast as might be, into my girdle. It was strange, wild work, the only company my own contorted shadow on the distant rocks and such wild forms of cruel British superstition as my excited imagination called up; the only sound the rumble of the storm, now overhead, and the hissing drip of the red resin gleaming on the wealth, all stamped with images of long-dead Kings and Consuls, that I was cramming into my pouch!