MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

[1806] that you can't stand up for yourself, and generally speaking that is
so. [1807] But given favourable conditions, a feeble and awkward assailant,
in your own class what, and a lonely place, and there's a chance of your
showing what stuff you are made of. [1808] And it is doubtless in order to
revive interest in this possibility, too often forgotten, that I have
delayed over an incident of no interest in itself, like all that has
a moral. [1809] But did I eat at least, from time to time?

[1810] Perforce, perforce,
roots, berries, sometimes a little mulberry, a mushroom from time to
time, trembling, knowing nothing about mushrooms. [1811] What else, ^ah yes,
carobs, so dear to goats. [1812] In a word whatever I could find, forests
abound in good things.

[1813] And having heard, or more probably read somewhere,
in the days when I thought it would help to educate myself, or to amuse
myself, or to stupefy myself, or to kill time, that when a man in a
forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is
going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way
to go in a straight line. [1814] For I stopped being half-witted, and became
as cute as a fox, whenever I took the trouble.

[1815] And my head was a store-
-house of useful knowledge. [1816] And if I did not go in a rigorously straight
line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a
circle, and that was something. [1817] And by going on doing this, day after
day, and night after night, I looked forward to getting out of the
forest, some day.

[1818] For my region was not all forest, far from it. [1819] But
there were plains too, mountains and sea, and some towns and villages,
with highways and byways between them. [1820] And I was all the more convinced
that I would get out of the forest some day, for having already got out
of it, more than once, and I knew how difficult it was not to do again
what you have done already. [1821] But things had been rather different then.
[1822] And yet I did not despair of seeing the light trem^ble, some day, through
the still boughs, the strange light of the plain, its pale wild eddies,