Each Tree, Though Full Of The Forms Of Life, Has All The Appearance Of Death.

Even to the outward eye they seem to be laden with ague, fever, sudden chills, and pestilential malaria.

When we first visited the spot we were alone, and we walked across from the railway line to the place at which the boats were moored. They lay in treble rank along the shore, and immediately above them an old steamboat was fastened against the bank. Her back was broken, and she was given up to ruin - placed there that she might rot quietly into her watery grave. It was midwinter, and every tree was covered with frozen sleet and small particles of snow which had drizzled through the air; for the snow had not fallen in hearty, honest flakes. The ground beneath our feet was crisp with frost, but traitorous in its crispness; not frozen manfully so as to bear a man's weight, but ready at every point to let him through into the fat, glutinous mud below. I never saw a sadder picture, or one which did more to awaken pity for those whose fate had fixed their abodes in such a locality. And yet there was a beauty about it too - a melancholy, death-like beauty. The disordered ruin and confused decay of the forest was all gemmed with particles of ice. The eye reaching through the thin underwood could form for itself picturesque shapes and solitary bowers of broken wood, which were bright with the opaque brightness of the hoar-frost.

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