A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of all enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from himself, was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the embers, in the dusky glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked food, tasting of smoke and cinders, as to some wild wolf that gnawed his vitals. In the darkness behind him lay the swart corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror in his mind. Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a dull, stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the swollen pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of the sleeplessness in his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his wet clothes, the filthy smell of the muck and slime that covered him, and all was mixed confusedly with a dimmer apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear forest. His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all his sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The fierce gnawing at his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention, as if something huge and bloated lay dead within him. His horror of the corpse had grown stronger even than the heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit, and he now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to be buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk from the labor of making it a grave. Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended, and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth over it, and left it to its rest. The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference. The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts; and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon. V.