The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees again. Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here and there by an uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight, or the blue flicker of a dancing and vanishing fen-light, he found the water still ankle or knee deep, and the walking difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees and stumps and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all about him, and in the branches overhead, there were such plungings and crashings, and such a clamor of flutterings and hootings and screechings, that his blood ran cold. He held his course, however, hoping to come upon some dry spot in the great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do to escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for his body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was drenched from head to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking, he shivered with cold. His vitals were weak and aching for want of food; his head was light with sleeplessness; and insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and horror-laden mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to iron, and that he would soon be unable to raise them for their weight, and would be obliged to stand there in the quagmire. Then in the glimmering darkness the moccasins would rise from the pools and surround him in a circle. They would gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of devilish serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in the branches all the panthers would gather, savagely grinning at him, and every one would have the visage of Lafitte. Then all at once the writhing wall of snakes would sway forward, and strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and strike again with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers would look on with the face of his master, and laugh softly with the smooth voice of his master. And the writhing wall would dilate and expand till every snake was vaster than an anaconda, and the mass together would fall away at every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the sky, and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would rise and resound through space, and the panthers and the tigers would dilate with the rest, and look on with enormous faces like his master’s, and their smooth laughter would grow louder and louder into smooth thunders of laughter, and the bristling and the striking and the swelling and the shrieking and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and forever. “Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”