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She stared at me. "Mother!" she exclaimed, "there is a woman wants me to give her these porridge."

"Well lass," replied a voice within, "give it her if she's a beggar. T' pig doesn't want it."

The girl emptied the stiffened mould into my hand, and I devoured it ravenously.

As the wet twilight deepened, I stopped in a solitary bridle-path, which I had been pursuing an hour or more.

"My strength is quite failing me," I said in a soliloquy.

"I feel I cannot go much farther.

Shall I be an outcast again this night? While the rain descends so, must I lay my head on the cold, drenched ground? I fear I cannot do otherwise: for who will receive me? But it will be very dreadful, with this feeling of hunger, faintness, chill, and this sense of desolation-this total prostration of hope.

In all likelihood, though, I should die before morning.

And why cannot I reconcile myself to the prospect of death? Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester is living: and then, to die of want and cold is a fate to which nature cannot submit passively.

Oh, Providence! sustain me a little longer! Aid!-direct me!"

My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape.

I saw I had strayed far from the village: it was quite out of sight.

The very cultivation surrounding it had disappeared.

I had, by cross-ways and by-paths, once more drawn near the tract of moorland; and now, only a few fields, almost as wild and unproductive as the heath from which they were scarcely reclaimed, lay between me and the dusky hill.

"Well, I would rather die yonder than in a street or on a frequented road," I reflected. "And far better that crows and ravens-if any ravens there be in these regions-should pick my flesh from my bones, than that they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper's grave."

To the hill, then, I turned.

I reached it.

It remained now only to find a hollow where I could lie down, and feel at least hidden, if not secure.

But all the surface of the waste looked level.

It showed no variation but of tint: green, where rush and moss overgrew the marshes; black, where the dry soil bore only heath.

Dark as it was getting, I could still see these changes, though but as mere alternations of light and shade; for colour had faded with the daylight.

My eye still roved over the sullen swell and along the moor-edge, vanishing amidst the wildest scenery, when at one dim point, far in among the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up.

"That is an ignis fatuus," was my first thought; and I expected it would soon vanish.

It burnt on, however, quite steadily, neither receding nor advancing.

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