He gave it up, and tried the Old Hundredth Psalm. This brought up, to his mental vision, the picture of his home, and the dreary old hand-organ man who droned out that psalm tune in the street regularly every Friday morning.
He could see Agnes in the shabby little parlour, and his mother's sweet, sad face, in her widow's cap, with the crippled baby in her arms. A great lump rose in his throat, and he dashed his hand across his eyes.
But it would never do to become sentimental, as he termed it, so he set himself vigorously to finding a suitable stream to follow. Now, the difficulty became that of finding any at all.
The jungle surrounded him on every side, he could not free himself from it. Every now and then he found what he thought a free glade or opening pathway, which he would pursue for a short distance, only to be again brought up in front of a tangle of creepers, glorious in colour, rich in purple or yellow festoons of exquisite flowers; snowed over with pure white blossoms, long wreaths of beauty pendant from the branches of the trees, and wholly preventing any progress.
Exquisite as the orchids and other plants were, he became weary of them and their sameness. Their perfume sickened him, their glory palled upon his sight. They were the same kinds—now common to him—over and over again. Oh, for a clump of English primroses nestled among moss and last year's brown leaves! Oh, for a bush of pink wild-roses, with golden hearts and delicate faint fragrance wafted upon a light breeze! Here everything was heavy and oppressive; too brilliant, too much, too unfamiliar, too unlike home.
Insect and reptile life troubled him greatly. The weather was growing very hot, and the density of the trees impeded every current of cool air. This was doubtless the cause of the difficulty in finding water, it was drying up so fast everywhere. Leeches got upon his legs, fixing themselves upon him with far too affectionate a tenacity; ants ran up his trousers, got into his boots; a thousand and one flying and crawling plagues assailed him.
Snakes and serpents wound their tails round trees, dropped coils in his path, and lifted flat heads from their meditations, to gaze on him with malevolent eyes. He did not know which were harmless and which were deadly, so suffered the same qualms alike from all.
He had a vague idea that a dark-coloured snake was more perilous than a yellow or green one, and never suffered more terror than when, sitting down to rest, and having fallen asleep, he perceived, upon waking, a long black thing reared on end, with pendant head bent over him.
For one moment he felt sick with horror, then perceived that it was the stem of a flower which he had never seen before, and which he had either overlooked from his fatigue when he sat down, or which had shot up its bloom with the most marvellous celerity while he was unconscious.
He had, indeed, slept for hours, having been quite worn out; and a special Providence must have guarded him during this long somnolence, or some noxious insect would certainly have attacked him the while.