Looking hastily about to see if he could better his situation, he cast his eye upon a prostrate tree, which some former gale had broken and overthrown, and from which the branches had mostly rotted and fallen away. It appeared to be hollow at the butt, and Jack ran to it, laughing at the thought of crawling in out of the rain. He put in his head, but took it out again immediately. The cavity was dark, and a disagreeable odor of rotten wood, suggestive of bugs and “thousand-legged worms,” repelled him.
“Never mind!” thought he. “I can clap my clothes in the hole, and have ’em dry to put on after the shower is over.”
He stripped himself in a moment, rolled up his garments in a neat bundle, and placed them, with his hat and shoes, within the hollow log.
“Now for a jolly shower-bath!” And, seeing an opening in the woods a little farther on, he capered towards it, laughing at the oddness of his situation, and at the feeling of the rain trickling down his bare back. A few more lightning flashes and tremendous claps of thunder, then a steady, pouring rain for about five minutes, in which Jack danced and screamed in great glee,—and the storm was over.
“What a soaking Phi and Phin must have got!” thought he. “And now won’t they be surprised to see me come home in dry clothes!”
The wind had gone down before; and now a flood of silver light, like a more ethereal shower, broke upon the still woods, brightening through its arched vistas, glancing from the leaves, and glistening in countless drops from the dripping boughs. A light wind passed, and every tree seemed to shake down laughingly from its shining locks a shower of pearls. Jack was filled with a sense of wonder and joy as he walked back through the beautiful, fresh, wet woods to his hollow log. He waited only a minute or two for his skin to dry, and for the boughs to cease dripping; then put in his hand where he had left his clothes. His clothes were not there!
Jack was startled: in place of the anticipated triumph of going home in dry garments, here was a chance of his going home in no garments at all! Yet who could have taken them? how was it possible that they could have been removed during his brief absence? “Maybe this isn’t the log!” He looked around. “Yes, it is, though!”
No other fallen trunk at all resembling it was to be seen in the woods. Then he stooped again, and thrust his hand as far as he could into the opening. He touched something,—not what he sought, but a mass of hair, and the leg of some large animal. He recoiled instinctively, with—it must be confessed—a start of fear.