s's head.

"I will tell Rosa that you were the man she believed you were when the
trial came," and with this Jack and Barney, with a flaming torch, set
forward hastily through the fantastic curtain of foliage and night,
which shut in the glimmering vista of specters, dark, sinister,
and menacing.

CHAPTER XXV

PHANTASMAGORIA.

To say that night is a time of terror is a commonplace. Night is not
terrible of itself. It is like the ocean--peace and repose if there be
no storm. But of all terrors there are none, outside a guilty mind, so
benumbing as night in the unknown. It does not lessen the horror of
darkness that fear makes use of the imagination for its agencies. Fancy,
intuition, and the train that follows the inner vision, these make of
night a phantasmagoria, compared to which Milton's inferno is a place of
comparative repose.

If you would realize the wondrous necromancy of the sun, pass a night in
some primeval forest, untouched by the hand of man. Until he stands in
the awful silence of the midnight wood, or upon some vast waste of
nature, no man can figure to himself the varied shapes the mind can give
to terrors based upon the mysterious noises of nature, and the goblin
motions of inanimate things. The lover thinking of his lass welcomes the
night and the rapturous walks among well-known scenes and kindly
objects. With glimmering lamps in the foliage and the not distant sounds
of daily life, even the woods have nothing fearful to the meditative or
the distraught. But in flight, with fear as a garment that can not be
laid aside, the somber forms of the forest are more terrible than an
army with banners, as a haunted house is a more unnerving dread than
burglars or any form of night marauders. It was at night that the
mutinous sailors of Columbus broke into decisive revolt; it was at night
that the iron band of Cortes lost heart, and were routed on the lakes of
Mexico; it was at night that the resolution of Brutus failed before the
disaster at Philippi.

That two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, which is the secret of
soldierly success, comes only from companionship. The night-wood is a
world by itself, filled with its own atmosphere, as oppressive to valor
as the electric reefs that drew the nails from the ships of Sindbad.
Among familiar scenes and well-known shapes, it is all the delight the
poets sing--so tranquillizing, inspiring, fecund, that in comparison the
thought of day brings up garish