forward with headlong velocity, half-conscious and wholly careless in his desperate exultation that black venomous water-snakes writhe up behind him as he plunges through their pools. Now he bounds over a bank of black mire, and swerves in his course as something like a dirty log changes to an alligator, and lumbers swiftly toward him with yawning jaws. And now splashing through the green slime of the margin, he bursts with a plunge into the glistening waters of the bayou, and swims with vigorous strokes, while the gaunt bittern on the bank beyond scrambles away with squawking screams. Swimming till the water shoals, he flounders on again through slime to mire, and over another bog of pools and water-plants and spongy sod, till gaining the outskirts of the dense forest, and reaching a patch of damp, black earth under an enormous cypress-tree, he slackens his pace, stops suddenly, and throwing up his arms upon the trunk, drops his head upon them, panting and blowing—and the first mile-heat of the dreadful race for Liberty or Death is run! III. For a few minutes, exhausted with the terrible speed he had maintained, Antony leaned upon his arms with closed eyes, his breath suffocating him, his heart painfully throbbing, his limbs aching and trembling, and the water dripping from his clothes and trickling away on the black soil in small streams. The trees whispered over him as he panted beneath them, and their mysterious murmurs were the only sounds, save his own stertorous breathings, that were heard in the dead stillness. Recovering his breath in a few minutes, he lifted his head and turned around, letting his pained arms fall heavily by his side. He was no longer oppressed with heat, for the plunge in the bayou had cooled him; but his whole body ached not only with the exertions of the last few minutes, but from the previous torture of the bucking, and already his strength, heavily taxed by his long abstinence from food (for it was now more than fifteen hours since he had eaten), and only sustained by the intense excitement he had undergone, began to flag. His brain reeled and whirled still, and his apprehension was confused and dull. Gradually he began to be more sensible of the sore and swollen condition of his wrists and ankles, of the smart of the wounds in his forehead, and the stinging of the fragments of glass in his face. There was one sore spot in his chest just beneath his shoulder, which for a few moments he was at a loss to account for, till he suddenly remembered that his tyrant’s foot had struck him there when he had kicked him over upon the floor. At the same instant he felt the chafe of the iron collar on his neck, and raising his hand suddenly, it struck against the blunt point of the prong. Gnashing his teeth with rage as the scene in that room rose in his mind, he seized the collar with both hands, and with a fierce imprecation, strove to rend it asunder. But the lock remained firm, and convulsed with a bitter sense