The Bursting of a Boom

I must call it, I suppose, now that it is dignified by "professors"). The only means of crossing open to me, so far as I could see, was a huge tree which had fallen across the stream and whose top was apparently firmly held by two trees standing side by side upon the opposite bank, between which it had lodged in falling. In this I had found, as I supposed, a secure bridge ready at my need. But alas for human calculations ! Thinking only of a possible danger more or less remote, I neglected to attend to the actual perils close at hand. The fallen tree was anchored to the bank on which I was standing only by the frailest of roots, and it needed nothing but my added weight to plunge both my bridge and myself into the water, from which I struggled out a miserable wretch; wet and muddy as to my person, wrathful and unhappy as to my mind. Now Warren, when he found himself confronted by Miss Wade, and plunged by Mitchell into the worst aspect of those very difficulties out of which he was trusting to this friend to deliver him; when he sawthat he was ruthlessly abandoned to extricate himself from this plight as best he could, felt very much as I did when I found, myself betrayed by my tree many years ago. Morally he was very much in the same plight in which I then found myself physically,?he was almost helpless, miserable, and abject. Miss Wade stood before him without a word, her face burning with confusion while Warren, hi his turn, for the first time in ...