CHAPTER X

ON TO POKKA, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO PRINCE JOHANN OF LAPLAND

Here then was Ivalomati, the village we had looked for so long, a place made up of one small house of logs, one squalid barn with yawning sides, and an adult population of three souls--a woman and two men. The adult population was away fishing, or rather attempting to fish, for, as it turned out, the toil of twenty-four hours brought forth no catch. A swarm of children of every age, from the crawler upwards, was left in charge. It was the eldest girl, a shy, wild creature, almost pretty, who took the canoe and brought us across the river; and she it was who offered us all the poor house could afford--a small, bare room.

There was more evidence of real poverty open to the public view in Ivalomati than at any other place we visited in Arctic Lapland. The children had not got summer clothes--the first we had seen lacking them. They wore the tattered rags of some winter furs, exposing three-quarters of their wretched skins to the intolerable bitings of the mosquitoes. We made a half-hearted attempt to buy food, and learned definitely what we had guessed, that they had no food even for themselves.

Life there might be hard, but the adults of Ivalomati were not the sort to make it most endurable. The two men were Finns, slack, doltish, and indolent. The woman was a Lapp, worn out with much child-bearing. The large-skulled, hybrid children seemed to have no occupation except to play about on a mud heap and try and stay their bellies by chewing the sappy river-grass.

A tattered, ancient net with birch-bark floats fluttered from the rotten drying-posts, a plantation of weeds flourished inside a broken-down fence, and these were the only indications of how a livelihood was made. Judging from the fly-blown, grass-covered midden outside the crumbling barn, there once had been a cow in Ivalomati, and a cracked iron cauldron, still holding the traces of a stew of reed grass and fish offal, gave indications that the cow had been fed according to the orthodox fashion of the country; but when we saw the place the cow was not, and all that stood between the wretched bipeds and starvation were the few small fish they could manage to dredge out of the Ivalojoki.

We "killed a tin" that night, and washed it down with a dose of weak cocoa; and after dinner the door opened and our three carriers came in with a peace-offering. Each had an armful of mouldy hay, which he deposited on the floor, and Johann gleefully waved a foul brown-calico sheet, which he pointed out would make us a most luxurious mosquito-bar. It seemed as though we were really going to get a comfortable night's sleep, and we wanted it.

The hay smelt of mustiness, and the sheet smelt of something worse, but we were in no mood for niceties. The room was alive with mosquitoes. Once, twice, and three times did we make raids upon them, and burn thousands with flaring torches, and for a moment the place would be clear. But only for a moment. Through the innumerable chinks of the walls of the roof there flew in constantly fresh thousands, who would drum their _pas de charge_ and set to work on our suffering bodies with heroic disregard of consequences. Desperately weary though we might be, there was no sleep to be got whilst one lay exposed to that horrible, relentless biting.

So we ranged the hay diagonally across the room into one long bed, and took the dirty sheet, and with strings to form the ridge, and thorns to pin the ends, and stones to hold down the sides, built us a tent some four feet long, on which we placed high hopes. To be sure it would only hold a head and shoulders of each of us, but the sleeping-sacks would sufficiently protect all parts which projected.

It required skill to get inside. We rolled our coats and put them in the middle of the tent to serve as pillows, and then we got into our sodden blanket-sacks, lay down on the hay, and cautiously wriggled our heads in under the opposite ends of the tent. There were three lusty mosquitoes inside when we arrived, and as these objected to being slaughtered without a chase, we had managed completely to disarrange the tent before they had met their due reward. This entailed a reconstruction of the entire edifice, and as Hayter said he was the least clumsy of the two of us, he crawled outside, replaced the stones on the sides, and jabbed in fresh thorns where they were needed. Inside I had plenty of work killing the mosquitoes which he let in during the process. Finally he crawled in again, and after the slaying of two others of the little pests which had managed to secrete themselves up till then, we lay still in the ecstatic hope that we were going to taste again of that almost forgotten luxury, easy sleep.

But did we so much as get into a doze? I fancy not. We lay there motionless on the hay, with our lower extremities hidden from the insects by the wet blankets, and our heads roof to roof beneath the odorous tent; and the sweat dripped out of us at every pore. A midnight sun was blazing high above the hut, and the air in the room was like that of an oven. The heat under the tent was stifling. Ever and again first one mosquito, and then another, and then a third, would get inside our defences, and we would have to bestir ourselves to slay them. The hay, too, was full of ticks, which added to our torments. When we lay down, our faces were puffed and blotched with the bites till we could scarcely see from our eyes; our hands were puffed out like boxing-gloves; and our arms were swollen till they fitted tight inside a coat-sleeve. And each of the million bites was a centre of irritation. Yet every minute this state of torture was being added to.

We passed that night in a condition bordering on frenzy, and let not those who merely know the mosquito in Africa, in India, and the Americas, judge us too hardly when I say that at times we wished most heartily we had never set foot in so detestable a country. Cold, we could have endured; privation, we were prepared for; but this horrible stew of flies ground upon the nerves till we were scarcely responsible for our actions.

* * * * *

In that plan of route we originally laid down at Enare, we had expected to find Ivalomati to be a village of tolerable size, and hoped to get carriers there who would take us on across the country to Pokka, and possibly to Scurujarvi. This idea was of course exploded, and so we set to work to try the power of blarney upon Pedr, Pat, and Johann, and persuade them to come farther on.

They did not see it one little bit. They said they had come much too far from home as it was, and had not the least wish to go farther. They were quite pleasant over their refusal, and quite determined. Johann mimicked the pair of us carrying the loads ourselves, tramping through the country, getting bogged in swamps, and losing the way, and finally dying of hunger and being covered up (like the babes in the wood) with a drift of grass and branches; and he roared with laughter at his own witty pantomime. Pedr glanced towards the direction in which Pokka lay, turned his back on it with decision, and smiled beautifully. And Pat, the unshaven Pat, looked so obsequious and so sly, and referred to his imaginary sore heel with such a roguish eye, that one really expected him to throw away disguise, and address us as "yer honours," and beg for John Jamieson's whisky there and then on the spot.

It was funny, but it was not business. Was our tramp across the country going to be broken after we had got so far and gone through so much, so very much? We rubbed our aching bites, and reasoned with the carriers still more earnestly. We besought them almost _in formâ pauperis_ (seeing that we had not got the power to command), and gradually their mood changed. It is humiliating now to remember how our spirits rose as they began to yield. And at last they consented to go with us as far as Pokka; but no farther. Be it well understood, they pointed out, they would only escort us to Pokka--only. Well, sufficient for the march (we told ourselves) were the carriers thereof. Subsequent marches must be left to provide for themselves.

Once they had agreed to go, there was no more delay. We borrowed a canoe, a very rotten canoe, got on board, and set off up the Ivalojoki.

We had trouble at first, because the river, which was almost as wide as a lake, was full of weeds, which clung to the canoe and clogged the paddles. But these cleared as the river narrowed, and we worked up between low banks where scrub birches grew amongst angular blocks of gray, lichened stone.

The banks came closer together as we paddled on, and the river increased in pace, and the way of the canoe grew less. Johann, with his mouth open and the sweat dripping from his chin, tugged manfully at the sculls in the bows. Pedr, who was squatted aft with the steering paddle, had his work cut out to keep clear of rocks round which the water swirled noisily, and occasionally there was a _bump-bump-bump_ as we dragged over some submerged boulder which he had not seen.

The little old canoe strained and shivered in the stress of the stream, and leaked so abundantly that Hayter, who was labouring mid-ships with the baler, could barely keep the water under; and presently, as she showed a disposition to swamp altogether, we had to run into the bank and lighten her burden. Pat, much to his disgust, was ousted from his rest among the baggage, and made to force his way through the tangle of shrub and swamp and grasses which made the river-bank; and we two foreigners went ashore with him. The two Lapps unshipped their paddles, and punted cannily up the rapids with eight-foot poles. They had hard work, but we on shore did not exactly find it easy going. Back-washes branched off the stream, sown with yellow lilies, and some we jumped across, and some we jumped into; and when the rapids came to an end some half mile higher up, and we were able to get on board again, liquid mud oozed from us into little black pools.

Half a mile of smooth brought us to another set of rapids, and once more a land party of three had to press its way through scrub and morass. Johann and Pedr punted the light canoe cleverly. One took the stern, the other perched in the bow. They stood up to put the pole in, and dropped it vertically. Then came a violent shove, and a sudden sit down at the end of the thrust. The canoe danced about like a twig in the rapids, and the waves slopped bountifully over her sides, and every now and again she had to be brought to the bank to be baled clear and ship a fresh crew. And finally the rapids got too bad for poling at all, and we made fast thongs of reindeer hide to the canoe at bow and stern and towed her empty up-stream with these, pressing through the scrub on the bank when we could, wading in the river-edge when it was too thick. It was the only way we could get her along. The river-banks were too swampy and overgrown to make a portage possible.

As a reward for labour we got some mile of easy water to finish up with, and then we left the flimsy little canoe finally, and set off once more on the solid tramp.

Again we came across the winter sleigh-track, a broad swathe cut from the forest, and left for the snows to smooth down into a road, and in a couple of miles this led us to a vast, quaking swamp set with a line of white, bleached crosses to make the trail. But till the frosts of winter came to harden it, the swamp here was quite impassable; it was a mere floating quagmire, and we had to skirt it tediously. Acres of cloud-berries, still unripe, lay upon its surface. The air was musical with the cries of curlew and other marsh fowl. And from above, the sun beat upon us with brazen power. Take away the Lapps, take away our sure knowledge that we were still far within the Arctic Circle, and we might have been tramping across some primæval land at the back of the Gold Coast or the Congo.

The ground rose as we toiled on, and for once the mosquitoes were almost entirely absent. It was bliss to be alive. There was a fine country all around, and we lazed off for an hour, and made a temporary camp to enjoy it. Beside us was a pool swarming with tadpoles, and we lay over the edge and searched and searched in hopes of finding a juvenile frog in the intermediate stage. But as usual we could not do it.

It was a subject which interested me. At an early age I was taught that from frog-spawn grew tadpoles, and from these grew frogs. Being of an inquiring, or a sceptical turn of mind, whichever way one likes to look at it, I used to catch the little black tadpoles, incarcerate them in pickle-bottles, and inspect them diligently; but never did the wished-for result arrive. It may be that a watched tadpole never changes; and certainly tadpoles do seem to suffer from nerves, because if one disturbs the surface of a pond where they are occupying themselves, away go the whole crowd like a lot of animated commas. But I am inclined to think that nervousness is not the reason of their coy refusal to do their advertised change-act in public view. It is beginning to grow on me that they cannot do it. Of course science says flatly that they do change; but when it wishes, science can lie like photography or a newspaper; and for the future the tadpole metamorphosis is eliminated from my private creed. If I am wronging tadpoles as a nation, I am sorry.

* * * * *

By this stage our Lapp carriers were all very foot-sore, though we ourselves were quite sound, which does not say much for the theory that it is always advisable to adopt the foot-gear of the country you are travelling over. At every halt one or other of them would take off his boots, extract the grass, spread it out to dry, and add more grass from the store each carried in his personal knapsack. It was the same grass which is used for the same purpose in Norway--crisp, dry, green, fine stuff, without knots, and without seeding tips. It has to be twisted up and kneaded between the hands to break the fibre; but once so prepared, it is much like a pad of soft horse-hair in texture. However, as I say, it chafed badly, and for summer work the bare foot inside the shoe would probably have been better. That was the way I was going myself; as the lower extremities of my stockings had long before worn away, and my feet had grown as hard as a nigger's.

We seemed to be passing away from the birdless region which lay inland from the Arctic coast. But still there was no great abundance of feathered creatures. On the swamps one could usually see a pair of curlew, but seldom more; from behind the forest trees one sometimes heard the cuckoo's hoot, though from one side of the country to the other we never saw the bird itself in the actual flesh and feather; and once, a little ringed dotterel came out into an open space before us and went through its pitiful pantomime of being wounded, just as one may see it on the shingle of a Shetland tarn. It was the breeding season for all of them of course, and even if we had possessed a gun, and from sheer stress of hunger been willing to slay nursing parents, we should have got little for our pains; certainly not enough to live on.

It was during a halt on this march, I remember, that Hayter suddenly exploded into a fit of (apparently) causeless merriment. I asked him what was the matter. He chuckled and said, "If only it would not cost so much," and stopped and laughed again.

I did not understand, and asked him to explain further.

He pointed to Johann, who was going through one of his quaint, domestic exercises, and said, "I wish we could get that beauty to London, and dump him down in (say) Willis's rooms, and bribe a waiter to put a smart luncheon in front of him, and then watch from a distance to see the result."

It was a luscious theme, and we enlarged on it with infinite enjoyment.

We pictured the result of taking Johann back to our native Islands and launching him upon Society. It would be a thing quite easily done, and as it happened I knew a parallel case where it was carried out, and many who read this will probably recollect (perhaps with some discomfiture) the hero of it. The matter happened quite recently.

Now, who remembers it? There arrived at Liverpool by a B. and A. steamer not four years ago a jet-black negro from the West Coast of Africa. He had a little money and more self-confidence than any white man on earth ever possessed. He wanted to have a good time in England, and he had it. He had come up from the Coast on the B. and A. boat in the ordinary second-hand clothes of civilisation, because, of course, plenty of people on board knew him for what he was. But once ashore in a London hotel (which is a very long way from a Liverpool quay or the West Coast of Africa), he took off his shoes and socks and started sandals and bare legs, he doffed his trousers and coat and shipped long embroidered robes of green and white, clapped a Haûsa hat on his head in place of the brown billy-cock, and announced that he was Prince H'umaduya, of some unpronounceable place behind the British Gold Coast.

Did any one doubt his statement? Not a soul who cared to speak. Childish, snobbish London took him at his own valuation, and competed for the honour of fêting him. He went everywhere, did everything, was fawned upon by everybody. White women waited on him--because he was a prince. The Lord Mayor gave him a dinner--because he was a prince. And he accepted it all with the self-assurance he had learned professionally, and asked for more.

But before his vogue was done, he wisely took himself off, and departed for Liverpool _en route_ for home and business. I saw him six months later, in the principal town on the Gold Coast, engaged in his professional avocation. He was selling a consignment of black, second-hand, wearing apparel, with noise and industry. Of course he had gone back to the ordinary boots and trousers and shirt of pseudo-civilisation, and was in fact very like any other third-rate auctioneer with a pitch in a back street. His name, as it appeared on his license and on his signboard down there on the Coast, was John Henry Brown, and he was reputed to be making money hand over fist, and saving it. He had tasted the sweets of being an imported prince in London once, and (as a year or two has passed since then) he is about due to turn up again and once more offer himself to the lionising public.

Now what we have got in mind is to do the same with Johann. The only thing necessary will be to teach him a working knowledge of English. We shall leave his personal habits severely alone; there is a surprisingness about them which is bound to be appreciated. And to alter his clothes (for general wear) would be to paint the lily.

John Henry Brown must have been at considerable pains to invent so picturesque a name as H'umaduya, but a name for our man comes glibly to hand. _Prince Johann of Lapland_ could not well be improved on for such a purpose. Get him to London, spend a guinea on a _Morning Post_ announcement of his arrival, and the thing would be done. Cards would rain in upon him, and people would scuffle with one another for the honour of getting him to their houses.

It is appetising to picture his behaviour. He would not be bashful in the very least: there is no shyness about Johann. And he would not be conventional: no, one could safely swear he would be quite the reverse of conventional. He might start a dinner seated on an orthodox chair, but if by any chance a bone came in his way, I am sure he would promptly retire to the hearth-rug and squat there cross-legged and gnaw it at his ease. Johann has a peculiar affection for bones. And after that he has fed, he will take a little tar from the bottle at his belt and anoint his face luxuriously, in view of a possible inroad of mosquitoes. Later on, if many people are admiring him excessively, and he feels very friendly disposed towards them, he will take off his boots and change the grass in them with care and deliberation. I can imagine the audience clasping their hands and saying, "How charmingly original it is of the dear prince to do such a thing!" I wonder, though, how they will stand it when he begins to scratch himself?

Afterwards I think we shall ship him across to Boston and New York. They love a prince there too, but they will not have him coloured. H'umaduya of the Gold Coast would not have gone down at any price in the States. The Americans have too many niggers at home to tolerate the _bouquet d'Afrique_ otherwise than in the appartments specially appointed to contain its assertive flavour; but Prince Johann of Lapland would be a very different matter. Every paper in New York would publish a personal interview illustrated with his photographs six hours before he landed. His political relations with "Czar Nicholas" would be dished up spicily; and the "barbaric splendours of his princely court" would be written of with vivid (and a slightly indecent) realism by gentlemen of the press, who know to a headline what their public want.

But unless there is absolutely no other competition on the carpet, I am afraid that he would not have so long a reign in the States as he had in England. In my own, my native land, we like curiosities; in the States they prefer culture. Curiosities are a drug in the States, and a slightly impertinent drug at that. Culture is rare, and so they imitate and talk about it all day long.

* * * * *

Except for the absence of game, the country we were travelling through was much the same as the Thames valley must have appeared to those hairy, naked savages who first looked out upon the levels where London now stands. Here was a forest of fire-slain pines, still reared up gaunt and gray, defying heaven. Young birches and hazels were growing up round them. And then would come mile after mile, and mile after mile, of spongy morass, seamed by rivulets, and smeared by stagnant ponds. The Thames valley became of use to man, so man drained it, and penned all the streamlets into one orderly river, and created dry land out of the swamps. But it is hard to fancy that these great wildernesses so far within the Arctic Circle will ever be reclaimed by the ditcher for his master, the factory builder.

We met, though, with some traces of man's handiwork, and man's toil for his own convenience, as we journeyed on. We came upon a great circular morass, four miles in diameter. It was ringed in by a jagged paling of pines, and in the exact centre was a hummocky oasis of gray, lichened stone. Years before logs had been laid down over the worst parts of the swamp; they were crumbling and insecure, but they showed a distinct attempt at road-making; and over these we picked our way in easy peril of sprained ankles. But still there were many places where the logs had melted, and through these we had to wallow in the fashion which we had learned so very thoroughly. I think that this frail path accentuated the general desolation.

A few miles farther on we met with some more advanced engineering. We had seen the Tokkaharo River on the map, and had wondered much whether we could find a ford, or whether we should be forced once more to go through the operation of rafting. And here before us was a bridge, a veritable bridge. It was primitive, certainly, and it was not above suspicion of being rotten. It had two piers of crossed logs, and the roadway was formed by single trunks, over which one progressed with the dainty step of the rope-dancer.

It was on this bridge, I regret to say, that Johann belied the reputation we had made for him, and proved to be not so perfect an acrobat in practice as he was in personal appearance. He stopped before the airy structure and looked at it with a puckered face, and it was evident that he stepped out on it with a failing heart. He travelled along the first log all right till it began to sway under him, and then he got demoralised, and landed on the first pier spread-eagle fashion, being grabbed in the nick of time by Pat and Hayter. The middle span he did not attempt to walk, but sat a-cock-stride of it, and worked himself over with his hands. He suffered severely from splinters _en route_, and the workings of his face were so utterly funny that I regret to say the entire audience of four shouted with laughter during the whole of his passage. However he gained the second pier safely, picked a few of the more obvious splinters out of his person, and contemplated the farther bank. It was temptingly close. He stepped on to the end of the log, where it rested on the pier, and stood there for a full minute. He found the process quite easy; so he set out to walk along it. At the third step he stretched out his arms, balancing with them. The log was beginning to sway and buckle under his weight. At the fourth step he lost his head and his nerve, and made a rush for it. And then he lost his footing altogether, cannoned against the log with his haunch, grabbed at it with eager hands, missed, and went souse into ten feet of icy water in the Takkaharo below. A swirl of the stream put him on the bank, and he clambered out, and rolled on the green in an ecstasy of merriment over his own clumsiness.

The log bridge had looked neglected enough, but its reason of being soon began to get apparent. We came upon a clearing full of old-cut stumps; wood had been taken from here for building. Then we passed some quarter-acre patches of rye growing amongst unkempt weeds, enclosed by rail fences. Then came more patches of clearing and more stumps, sprawling over two miles of ground. And then, from the top of a knoll, a high well-derrick rose into view, and directly afterwards we saw beneath us the scattered settlement of houses which made up the village of Pokka. Three houses were in sight, sprawling over a square mile of ground, and each house had its attendant barns and cowsheds. A streamlet ran between them, broadening out here and there into sedgy lagoons. And beside the lagoons were nets, with birch-bark floats and pebble sinkers, hung out to dry upon weather-bleached rails.

We marched up wearily enough to the front of the nearest house, and then arose a difficulty which was new to us. Our Lapps did not march straight inside. They did not even knock at the door. They dumped their packs on to the ground, and hung about near them, three perfect images of bashfulness.

Presently the mystery was explained: the house belonged to Finns, an alien race. We two foreigners, however, were not troubled with any qualms of inferiority. The wandering Britisher seldom is worried that way. He is a very complacent animal over questions of nationality, and is rather apt to thank God in his prayers that he is not as other men are, "even as this German, or this Chinaman, or this Finn," or whoever he may have had brought under his lordly notice last. So we knocked at the door of the house, and presently a man came out. He shook hands limply with us; he even shook hands with the three Lapps. He was a long, slack-jointed Finn, with one ear missing and a face as unemotional as a slab of board. He gave us one of the two rooms his house contained, the sour-smelling dairy-bedroom; and better still, on pressure, he sold us food.

A woman brought it in--rye-cake and a double handful of small pieces of raw fish, semi-dried, and a tub of thick, sour milk. As an after-thought she produced a wooden spoon, which she thoughtfully licked clean, and set beside the repast.

With regard to that brown rye-cake of Lapland, I brought a piece home to England, which my dog saw and annexed. He is a fox-terrier of lusty appetite, and he tried to eat it. He tried for a whole afternoon, and finally left the cake alone on a lawn, very little the worse for the experience. His master, at Pokka, did better. He was sick with hunger, and devoured two great slabs of the cake, and with it a handful of the stinking fish.

Looked back at from a distance, those rye-cakes of Lapland do not carry pleasant memories. The grain from which they are baked grows with little tending. It is sown; and it is suffered to come up as the weather and the weeds permit. When it is as near ripe as it chooses to get, it is reaped, and with the husks, the bran, a larger part of the stalk, and a fair percentage of the companionable weed, it is chopped into meal. It is not ground; it is more hay and bran than anything else. Baking days come seldom, and a large supply is made at once. The dough is pawed out into discs a foot in diameter and some five-eighths to three-quarters of an inch thick. Each disc has a hole in the middle, and when they are baked, the cakes are strung on a stick and hung up on the rafters for use as required. Age neither softens nor hardens their texture; years could not deteriorate them.

There are two varieties of these delectable cakes. One sort was like india-rubber, and on this we could make no impression whatever. But with the other kind, which was of the consistency of concrete, we could, as a rule, get on quite well, if we were given time. It was more or less flavourless, unless it had been packed with stale fish, and it was not stuff to hurry over. It was not strengthening either, as the system could assimilate but very little of it. In fact, of all the foods that ever got past my teeth (and in rambling about the back corners of this world I have come across some uncanny morsels) the bread of Arctic Lapland carries the palm for general unsatisfactoriness. But still there is no denying that the cakes did fill the stomach, and for this purpose we employed them ravenously whenever they came in our way. There is no ache so bitter as that of empty belly.

In that sour-smelling dairy-bedroom however at Pokka, Hayter was in small temper for food. The bites of the preceding night were giving him the most abominable pain. From scalp to heels he had no sound square inch on all of his skin. The whole of his body was puffed and reddened, and each bite was its own centre of irritation. When he scratched himself he bled, and he had to scratch. He faced the poor meal with visible shrinkings; he was tormented with a furious thirst, but he could not eat; and finally, out of sheer weariness, he slid from his stool on to the floor and dropped off into some sort of sleep.

For the morrow, trouble loomed. Our host, the expressionless man who lacked an ear, came in and said flatly that no carriers were to be had. But for myself I heard the news without much stir. I had eaten; and with food inside him, a man is apt to let the morrow take care of itself.

It seemed good to me to go outside for a whiff of sweet air before turning in. I strolled across the short-grassed green in front of the house, and sat me on the well-platform, and stared sleepily at what was around. From the mistal behind my shoulder came the breathing and chewing of a couple of cows; from the little two-roomed house at the other side of the clearing there droned out the snores of the tired Lapps.

In front of me, the stream widened out into a lagoon, smooth as a sheet of gleaming metal. Just outside the weeds a fish was rising accurately in the same spot. The sun lit the forest trees on the opposite shore with a lurid glow. Mist, like miasma, was rising in gray billows from some of the farther creeks. I watched it drowsily, and imagined that somehow or another I was looking upon a sunrise in the Tropics, and that I had earned a touch of fever. And then I pulled myself together, and remembered that this was Arctic Lapland, and that it was midnight by the cuckoo clock in the Finns house, and that the insects were biting me to pieces. So I got heavily up from the well-cover, and went again to the sour-smelling dairy, and forgot all things in deep, unconscious sleep.