XXVII.—REVELATIONS, 412 XXVIII.—THE SABBATH MORNING, 421 XXIX.—HELL ON HEAVEN IMPINGING, 428 XXX.—THE HEARTS OF CHEVALIERS, 443 XXXI.—WRECK AND RUIN, 453 XXXII.—HERALD SHADOWS, 467 XXXIII.—THE OLD ACHAIAN HOUR, 485 XXXIV.—IN LIBERTY’S DEFENCE, 502 XXXV.—PALLIDA MORS, 517 XXXVI.—IO TRIUMPHE, 534 EPILOGUE, 549 NOTE, 557 HARRINGTON. PROLOGUE. I. As hot a day as ever blazed on the lowlands of Louisiana, blazed once in mid-April on the plantation of Mr. Torwood Lafitte, parish of Avoyelles, in the Red River region. Perhaps it was because the heat was so unseasonable that it seemed as if never, not even in midsummer, had there been so hot a day. One might have been pardoned for imagining that heat not of this world. Mr. William Tassle, overseer to Lafitte, was a profane man, but he might have been considered as only a profane poet aiming at the vivid expression of a mystical dark truth, when, speaking of the day, he said it was as hot as Hell. It was the Sabbath, but an active fancy, brooding over the general condition of man and nature on Mr. Lafitte’s plantation, might have thought it rather the Devil’s Sabbath than the Sabbath of the Lord. Through the vaporous atmosphere, simmering with the heat, swarming with insect life, and reeking with the dense, sickly sweetness of tropic plants and flowers, the fierce sun poured a flood of stagnant, yellow light, which lay in a broad and brassy glare over the low landscape. Veiled by the cruel radiance, rose afar in the west and north the Pine Woods of Avoyelles, and in the southern distance the solemn masses of gloom formed by the cotton-woods, live-oaks and cypresses of the Great Pacondrie Swamp. The eye wandering backward from the depths of the morass, saw the smouldering fire of the atmosphere envelop the enormous trees, draped everywhere with long streamers of black moss, and kindle the broad palmetto bottoms, and the multi-colored luxuriance of tropical vegetation, which sprang into ranker life beneath the vivid and sullen ray. The sluggish tide of the bayou basked with snaky gleams in the quivering lustre; the red marl of the plantation where mules and negroes were toiling painfully under the oaths and blows of the drivers and overseer, darkly glowed in it; the bright, rank green of the lawn before the mansion was aflare with it; and the mansion itself, with its rose and jasmin vines drooping around the posts of the veranda, looked scorched to a deeper brown in the hot, thick, yellow, intolerable glare.