of humiliation, as he thought of that accursed badge of his servitude inexorably riveted to his neck, the miserable man burst into tears. It was but a brief spasm, and summoning up new courage to his failing heart as he remembered that his dreadful journey lay still before him, he cast his eyes around into the swamp. Softened by the foliage of the wilderness of gigantic trees, and duskily lighting the long streamers of melancholy moss which greyed their green, the sultry sunlight, slanting athwart the enormous trunks, and tinting with sullen brilliance the scarlet, blue and yellow blossoms of parasitical plants which sprinkled the boles and branches in thick-millioned profusion, glistered on the muddy shallows of the morass, whose dismal level, broken here and there by masses of shadow, and huge bulks of fallen timber, stretched far away, like some abominable tarn of slush and suds, into vistas of horrid gloom. Here and there, stranded on shoals of mire, or basking on pieces of floodwood, alligators, great and small, sunned their barky hides; while from every shallow pool, or wriggling around drifting logs or trunks of fallen trees, the venomous moccasin-snakes, whose bite is certain death, lifted their black devilish heads by scores, and made the loathsome marsh more loathsome with their presence. Over the frightful quagmire brooded an oppressive stillness, broken only by the mournful and evil whispering of the trees, or by the faint wriggling plash of the water-serpents. Thick, sickly odors of plants and flowers, blent with the stench of the morass, burdened the stagnant air, through whose languid warmth chill breaths crept from the dank and dense arcades of the forest. Vast, malignant, desolate and monstrous, loomed in the eyes of the wretched fugitive, the awful road to Liberty or Death. His soul shrank from treading it. The fire had faded from his heart, and in that moment death by his own hand, for he would not be captured, seemed preferable to the terrors of the fen. Faint, weak, famished, weary unto agony, his whole body one breathing ache, his spirit all unnerved with the sense of his past and present misery, and nothing but despair before him, how could he hope to go on and live. Yet he could not remain here. Soon the hounds would be on his track—they would cross the bayou he had swam, and strike his trail. He must plunge still further into the swamp to distance them, or he must die here by the knife in his hand.