r, to interfere between them. The lonely
wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamour and
clapper-clawing; eyed the den of discord askance; and hurried on his
way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.

One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the
neighbourhood, 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 neighbourhood. 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 out 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 swamp.

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 time 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 w