No One Ventured, However, To Interfere Between Them; The Lonely
Wayfarer Shrunk Within Himself At The Horrid Clamor 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 neighborhood,
he took what he considered a short cut homewards 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 noon-day, 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, and where 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, among 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 piece of
firm 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
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 that Tom Walker reached the old
fort, and he paused there for a while 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 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 turned up
the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard.
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