There was even a piece of
patch which had been put on it, though it had never been
half-soled.
How it came there I knew not; neither could I in the
least imagine. But, as I say, like a man perfectly
confused and out of myself, I rushed home into my hut,
not feeling the ground I went upon. I fled into it like
one pursued, and, as my mother said, when I fell into my
chair, panting, I looked as if I had seen a ghost.
It was worse than that, as I said to her.
PART II
I cannot well tell you how much dismay this sight of a
footprint in the ground gave me, nor how many sleepless
nights it cost me. All the time I was trying to make
my mother think that there was no ground for anxiety,
and yet all the time I was showing her that I was very
anxious. The more I pretended that I was not troubled,
the more absent-minded, and so the more troubled, I
appeared to her. And yet, if I made no pretence, and
told her what I really feared, I should have driven her
almost wild by the story of my terrors. To have our
pretty home broken up, perhaps to be put in the
newspapers--which was a lot that, so far, we had always
escaped in our quiet and modest life--all this was more
than she or I could bear to think of.
In the midst of these cogitations, apprehensions, and
reflections, it came into my thoughts one day, as I was
working at my shop down-town with my men, that all this
might be a chimera of my own, and that the foot might be
the print of my own boot as I had left it in the soil
some days before when I was looking at my melons.
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