robably greet me! Had I not already (thus the tempter
continued) been swimming rather unaccountably far, supposing me on a
straight track for that inviting spot where my sentinels and my drapery
were awaiting my return?

Suddenly I felt a sensation as of fine ribbons drawn softly across my
person, and I found myself among some rushes. But what business had
rushes there, or I among them? I knew that there was not a solitary spot
of shoal in the deep channel where I supposed myself swimming, and it
was plain in an instant that I had somehow missed my course, and must
be getting among the marshes. I felt confident, to be sure, that I could
not have widely erred, but was guiding my course for the proper side of
tie river. But whether I had drifted above or below the causeway I had
not the slightest clew to tell.

I pushed steadily forward, with some increasing sense of lassitude,
passing one marshy islet after another, all seeming strangely out of
place, and sometimes just reaching with my foot a soft tremulous shoal
which gave scarce the shadow of a support, though even that shadow
rested my feet. At one of these moments of stillness it suddenly
occurred to my perception (what nothing but this slight contact could
have assured me, in the darkness) that I was in a powerful current,
and that this current set _the wrong way_. Instantly a flood of new
intelligence came. Either I had unconsciously turned and was rapidly
nearing the Rebel shore,--a suspicion which a glance at the stars
corrected,--or else it was the tide itself which had turned, and which
was sweeping me down the river with all its force, and was also sucking
away at every moment the narrowing water from that treacherous expanse
of mud out of whose horrible miry embrace I had lately helped to rescue
a shipwrecked crew.

Either alternative was rather formidable. I can distinctly remember that
for about one half-minute the whole vast universe appeared to swim
in the same watery uncertainty in which I floated. I began to doubt
everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which
I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such
visionary things could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled in my mind
like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet
unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch
at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in that
singular sensation of nightmare