vy-covered stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old
trees stretched out at length, were faintly seen in beautiful confusion.

As the sunlight died away, and evening fell upon the wood, he entered
it. Moving, here and there a bramble or a drooping bough which stretched
across his path, he slowly disappeared. At intervals a narrow opening
showed him passing on, or the sharp cracking of some tender branch
denoted where he went; then, he was seen or heard no more.

Never more beheld by mortal eye or heard by mortal ear; one man
excepted. That man, parting the leaves and branches on the other side,
near where the path emerged again, came leaping out soon afterwards.

What had he left within the wood, that he sprang out of it as if it were
a hell!

The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay among
the last year's leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen headlong
down. Sopping and soaking in among the leaves that formed its pillow;
oozing down into the boggy ground, as if to cover itself from human
sight; forcing its way between and through the curling leaves, as if
those senseless things rejected and forswore it and were coiled up in
abhorrence; went a dark, dark stain that dyed the whole summer night
from earth to heaven.

The doer of this deed came leaping from the wood so fiercely, that he
cast into the air a shower of fragments of young boughs, torn away
in his passage, and fell with violence upon the grass. But he quickly
gained his feet again, and keeping underneath a hedge with his body
bent, went running on towards the road. The road once reached, he fell
into a rapid walk, and set on toward London.

And he was not sorry for what he had done. He was frightened when he
thought of it--when did he not think of it!--but he was not sorry. He
had had a terror and dread of the wood when he was in it; but being
out of it, and having committed the crime, his fears were now diverted,
strangely, to the dark room he had left shut up at home. He had a
greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room than of the wood. Now
that he was on his return to it, it seemed beyond comparison more dismal
and more dreadful than the wood. His hideous secret was shut up in the
room, and all its terrors were there; to his thinking it was not in the
wood at all.

He walked on for ten miles; and then stopped at an ale-house for a
coach, which he knew would pass through, on its way to London, befor