Gaining the opposite bank, he stopped on a patch of black mire, to put on his shoes, and then went forward, beating the path before him. Dreadful apprehensions of the beasts and reptiles which inhabited the swamp, now crowded on his mind, while to add to his distress, the sunlight in the forest spaces was stealing rapidly upward from the foliage of the loftiest trees. Quickening his pace, he staggered on through the haunted dusk of the tree-trunks, with the hooting of the swamp owls, the quacking of innumerable ducks, the bellowing and plunging of alligators, the screeching and screaming of strange, semi-tropic birds, the howling of distant beasts, and the multitudinous croak of frogs, sounding on every side around him. He broke into a heavy run, came at length to a thinner part of the forest, and presently emerged upon a vast open space of quagmire, stretching two or three miles away, with scattered trees standing and leaning in all directions in its broad expanse. Here he paused. The sun had sunk behind the distant forest, tinging the misty sky far up the zenith with lowering red, and suddenly, as by some fell enchantment, the swamp had become a sullen slough of blood. Shadows of inky blackness stretched athwart the red expanse, and the distorted trees that crossed and intercrossed each other here and there, were giant eldritch shapes of unimaginable things. Lank and hairy—all askew and bristling—clothed as with fearful rags—with monstrous heads ahunch in unnatural places, and shaggy jags of drooping beards, and dusky arms grotesquely forked and twisted, and huge lengths of gaunt body that abruptly splayed and sprawled in malformed feet—they loomed from the fen of murky gore against the angry color of the sky, like some black congress of ambiguous mongrel wizards whose spell was on the scene. All around beneath them, protruding from the red lagoons, huge butts of logs, gnarled stumps, and black knees of cypress, squatted and crouched like water-fiends. Through the dusky air, laden with the damp smell of the swamp, frightful brown bats whirled clacking to and fro in the red light like lesser demons on the wing. From every side came hootings and croakings, screechings and wailings, howlings and bellowings and sullen plunges, like the riotous clamor of devils at some tremendous incantation. A sense of supernatural horror pervaded all, and weighed upon the appalled heart of the trembling fugitive. He hesitated a few moments whether to cross this dreary expanse, or strike off into the denser forest, but decided to go forward. Whipping a pool before him which did not move, he was just setting his foot in it, when the venomous face of a moccasin rose at him with a dark slapping flash. He sprang back simultaneously, and saw the monster vanish, feeling at the same time a sharp pang just above his ankle. He was bitten! All was over!