第74章 AMPERSAND(14)

She drops great trees across them, and blots then out with windfalls. But the blazed line--a succession of broad axe-marks on the trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a level--cannot be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the safest guide through the woods.

Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted also was this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or unwary digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the saddest and most humiliating surprises of this mortal life.