ved in a forlorn-looking house that stood alone and had an air of
starvation. A few straggling savin-trees, emblems of sterility, grew near
it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveler stopped at its
door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a
gridiron, stalked about a field where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely
covering the ragged beds of pudding-stone, tantalized and balked his
hunger, and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look
piteously at the passer-by, and seem to petition deliverance from this
land of famine.

The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a tall
termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice
was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband, and his face sometimes
showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. 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 homeward 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 noonday, 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 traveler into a gulf of black
smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the
tadpole, the bullfrog, 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 the 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 the