day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the
neighborhood, he took what he considered a short-cut homeward, through
the swamp. Like most short-cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp
was thickly grown with great, gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them
ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for
all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires,
partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often
betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there
were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the
bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks
lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in
the mire.

Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous
forest, stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots, which afforded
precarious footholds among deep sloughs, or pacing carefully, like a
cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees, startled now and then by
the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck,
rising on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a
firm piece of ground, which ran like a peninsula into the deep bosom
of the swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during
their wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of
fort, which they had looked upon as almost impregnable, and had used
as a place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained
of the old Indian fort but a few embankments, gradually sinking to the
level of the surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks
and other forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the
dark pines and hemlocks of the swamps.

It was late in the dusk of evening when Tom Walker reached the old
fort, and he paused there awhile to rest himself. Any one but he would
have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for
the common people had a bad opinion of it, from the stories handed
down from the times of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the
savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the Evil Spirit.

Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of
the kind. He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen
hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving
with his walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he
tur