his fear and fury gave him superhuman energy, and nerved with unnatural vigor his weakened thews. He swam for a long time, with the solemn night of the dense cypress dusking his form and shadowing the tarn. At length the dreadful twilight of the grove began to lighten, and far beyond he saw the sunlight illuminating the grey and green of the trees, and the many colored parasites and flowers, and shining on the mud and water of the marsh. Presently he struck bottom, and wading again for a long distance, emerged at length into the sunlight, among the shallows and mud-shoals, and rushed on as before, till at last, as the sun was near its setting, he stood on the banks of an unknown river, which, whispering sullenly past its margin of sedge and water-flowers, moved, with an imperceptible motion, through the solemn and horrible wilderness of forest. He stood gazing across it with a haggard and mournful countenance. The croak of frogs came faintly from its border, and mingled with the distant quacking of crowds of mallard ducks from the opposite shore, the vague hooting of owls in the swamp beyond, and the occasional plunge of an alligator from the adjacent margin. Dreary and ominous sounds, which yet hardly disturbed the stagnant stillness around him. The wind had lulled, and no whisper came from the bearded trees, which stood like boding shapes on every side. Hope was faint in the heart of the fugitive. Relieved from the engrossment of the immediate peril, his spirit began to come under the sole dominion of the brooding horrors around him, and as he vainly pondered on the dark problem of his deliverance, Death seemed ever gathering slowly toward him, and Liberty lessening in ever-growing distance. Liberty or Death. The historic phrase came to him again like a voice that urged him forward. He paused only a little longer, to tear a strip from his coarse shirt and tie the bowie-knife at the back of his neck to the iron collar. Then tearing another strip, he pulled off his heavy brogans, shook the mud out of them, and passing the strip through the eyelets, he also secured them to the collar, one on each shoulder. So accoutred, he braced himself anew for effort, and taking up a slender sapling from the ground to beat the pools between him and the bayou—for he now feared the moccasins—in a few moments he was in the water, steadily swimming forward, with the sapling held in his teeth.