orks were
filled with violence and uproar. They were now possessed by stillness
and death. The blood-stained conquerors had departed; and their camp,
which had so lately rung with the merry rejoicings of a victorious army,
lay a silent and deserted city of huts. The fortress was a smouldering
ruin; charred rafters, fragments of exploded artillery, and rent
mason-work, covering its earthen mounds in confused disorder.

A frightful change had also occurred in the season. The sun had hid its
warmth behind an impenetrable mass of vapor, and hundreds of human
forms, which had blackened beneath the fierce heats of August, were
stiffening in their deformity, before the blasts of a premature
November. The curling and spotless mists, which had been seen sailing
above the hills towards the north, were now returning in an interminable
dusky sheet, that was urged along by the fury of a tempest. The crowded
mirror of the Horican was gone; and, in its place, the green and angry
waters lashed the shores, as if indignantly casting back its impurities
to the polluted strand. Still the clear fountain retained a portion of
its charmed influence, but it reflected only the sombre gloom that fell
from the impending heavens. That humid and congenial atmosphere which
commonly adorned the view, veiling its harshness, and softening its
asperities, had disappeared, and the northern air poured across the
waste of water so harsh and unmingled, that nothing was left to be
conjectured by the eye, or fashioned by the fancy.

The fiercer element had cropped the verdure of the plain, which looked
as though it were scathed by the consuming lightning. But, here and
there, a dark green tuft rose in the midst of the desolation; the
earliest fruits of a soil that had been fattened with human blood. The
whole landscape, which, seen by a favoring light, and in a genial
temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured
allegory of life, in which objects were arrayed in their harshest but
truest colors, and without the relief of any shadowing.

The solitary and arid blades of grass arose from the passing gusts
fearfully perceptible; the bold and rocky mountains were too distinct in
their barrenness, and the eye even sought relief, in vain, by attempting
to pierce the illimitable void of heaven, which was shut to its gaze by
the dusky sheet of ragged and driving vapor.

The wind blew unequally; sometimes sweeping heavily along the ground,