"We scared the ducks though. Pity we didn't bring our guns and bag a few."
"I believe we'll have a right good breakfast at Findlayson's," said Craig; "so I propose we now have a mouthful of something and start."
The gloom of that deep forest became irksome at last; though some of its trees were wondrous to behold in their stately straightness and immensity of size, the trunks of others were bent and crooked into such weird forms of contortion, that they positively looked uncanny.
Referring to these, Archie remarked to Craig, who was riding by his side:
"Are they not grotesquely beautiful?"
Craig laughed lightly.
"Their grotesqueness is apparent anyhow," he replied. "But would you believe it, in this very forest I was a week mad?"
"Mad!"
"Yes; worse than mad—delirious. Oh, I did not run about, I was too feeble! but a black woman or girl found me, and built a kind of bark gunja over me, for it rained part of the time and dripped the rest. And those trees with their bent and gnarled stems walked about me, and gibbered and laughed, and pointed crooked fingers at me. I can afford to smile at it now but it was very dreadful then; and the worst of it was I had brought it all on myself."
Archie was silent.