, and I lay on my blanket listening to such plaintive
and heart-rending cries as I had never known. Human cries they were,
cries as of children in distress, and I rose to a sitting posture on the
deck with my hair standing up straight, to discover Nick beside me in
the same position.

"God have mercy on us," I heard him mutter, "what's that? It sounds like
the wail of all the babies since the world began."

We listened together, and I can give no notion of the hideous
mournfulness of the sound. We lay in a swampy little inlet, and the
forest wall made a dark blur against the star-studded sky. There was a
splash near the boat that made me clutch my legs, the wails ceased and
began again with redoubled intensity. Nick and I leaped to our feet
and stood staring, horrified, over the gunwale into the black water.
Presently there was a laugh behind us, and we saw Xavier resting on his
elbow.

"What devil-haunted place is this?" demanded Nick.

"Ha, ha," said Xavier, shaking with unseemly mirth, "you have never
heard ze alligator sing, Michie?"

"Alligator!" cried Nick; "there are babies in the water, I tell you."

"Ha, ha," laughed Xavier, flinging off his blanket and searching for his
flint and tinder. He lighted a pine knot, and in the red pulsing flare
we saw what seemed to be a dozen black logs floating on the surface.
And then Xavier flung the cresset at them, fire and all. There was a
lashing, a frightful howl from one of the logs, and the night's silence
once more.

Often after that our slumbers were disturbed, and we would rise
with maledictions in our mouths to fling the handiest thing at the
serenaders. When we arose in the morning we would often see them by the
dozens, basking in the shallows, with their wide mouths flapped open
waiting for their prey. Sometimes we ran upon them in the water, where
they looked like the rough-bark pine logs from the North, and Nick
would have a shot at them. When he hit one fairly there would be a
leviathan-like roar and a churning of the river into suds.

At length there were signs that we were drifting out of the wilderness,
and one morning we came in sight of a rich plantation with its dark
orange trees and fields of indigo, with its wide-galleried manor-house
in a grove. And as we drifted we heard the negroes chanting at their
work, the plaintive cadence of the strange song adding to the mystery
of the scene. Here in truth was a new world, a land of peaceful customs,
g