wilderness looked out dimly, wondering, over this wonderful new country
into which both were come, without knowing how or why or whence, through
no will or choice of their own.

That portion of Kentucky rises gently but steadily from the river, and
rolls gradually upward toward its eastern hills. On this October night
so close to the very beginning of the commonwealth, these terraced hills
were still covered with the primeval forest. Hill after hill, and forest
after forest, on and on and higher and higher, till the earth and the
heavens came together. Near the river on the natural open spaces, and
where earliest the clearings had been made, the boy could see the widely
scattered rude homes, the young orchards, and the new fields, which the
first Kentuckians had won from the wilderness, from the savage, from the
wild beast and the pestilence. Southward, and a long way off, lay the
great Cypress Swamp. The wavering sable line of its tree-tops spread a
pall across the starless horizon. The deadly white mists which shrouded
its gloomy mystery through the sunniest day were now creeping out to
enshroud the higher land. Through the mingled mist and darkness the
sombre trunks of the towering cypress trees rose with supernatural
blackness. The mysterious "knees," those strange, naked, blackened
roots, so wildly gnarled and twisted about the foot of the cypress,
appeared to writhe out of the swamp's awful dimness like monstrous
serpents seen in a dreadful dream.

And thus these dark fancies swayed the boy's imagination as wind sways
flame, till he suddenly remembered and turned from them more quickly and
firmly than ever before. He had made up his mind to cease dreaming with
his eyes open. He was resolved to see only real sights and to hear only
real sounds from this time on. He did not deceive himself by thinking
that this ever could be easy for him to do. He knew too well that in
place of the cool, steady common-sense which should dwell in every man's
breast, there dwelt something strangely hot and restless in his own. He
had always felt this difference without understanding it; but he had
hoped that no one else knew it--up to the cruel revelation of Ruth's
laughing and kindly meant words. Well, neither Ruth nor any one should
ever again have cause to laugh at him for romantic weakness, if he might
help it by keeping guard over his fancy.

He therefore sternly kept his eyes away from the swamp where mystery
always brooded.