hues, flaunting figures--the hardness,
harshness and unlovely in life. But night in the goblin-land, where Dick
found himself suddenly deserted, with fantastic forms swaying in the
lazy wind, would have had terrors for the most constant mind; terrors
such as filled the soul of MacBeth, when Birnam wood came marching to
Dunsinane. In an instant, as it seemed to Dick's exalted and painfully
impressionable sense, every separate leaf, branch, brier, copse, and
jungle, was endowed with a voice of its own--hateful, irritating,
mocking. Swarms of peering eyes hovered in the air, glowering uncanny
menace into the boy's wild, dilating vision.

Brave, even to recklessness, Dick was, as you have seen; but no sooner
had the glimmer of Jack's torch flickered and fluttered into the black
distance, making place for the monstrous shapes, the luring shadows, and
threatening forms encompassing him, than Dick threw himself, with a
wailing shriek, into the morass in a wild attempt to follow.

In an instant he was up to his middle in mud and water. He seized the
prickly branches coiling about and above him; he gasped in prayerful
pleading, the home teaching still strong in him; but there was no
answer, save the crooning night-birds and the croaking frogs. Slimy
things touched his torn flesh; whirring birds shot past him, disturbed
in their night perches. The deadly odor, pungent and nauseous, of a
thousand exhaling herbs, filled his nostrils. The darkness grew,
instinct with threatening forms. He gasped, struggled, and in a fervent
outburst of thanksgiving regained the dank mound. Ah, there was life on
that! human life. Jones slept, the stertorous sleep of delirium. He
murmured brokenly. Dick was too terrified to distinguish what he said.
The blaze of the pine knot flared from side to side as the sighing
breeze arose from the brackish pools, protesting the vitality of even
this moribund hades. Ah! if he could but lie down and bury his face. The
horses? They were feeding tranquilly yonder, standing up to their knees
in mosses and water. The lines that tied them were long. They could move
about. This was some comfort. They were more human than the dreadful
specters that filled the place.

Ah! the blessed, blessed light that flamed out from the merry
pine-torch; he didn't wonder that half the Eastern world worshiped fire.
He adored it--blessed, blessed fire--the sign of God, the beacon of the
human. Hark! What half-human--or rather wholly i