During the course of the evening we had been conscious of a growing babel of sounds, which arose on all sides in the great, dark, outside world, and which deepened in intensity as the night wore on. Every now and then a hoarse bellow as of some mammoth bull that, slumbering, had been awakened by intolerable agony, came from the alligators that abounded in the surrounding swamp. We had noticed that the door of the hut was a crazy concern, loosely hasped, and with an unfastened padlock on the outside. Inside, its only protection was a wooden bar, which shot so smoothly in its grooves as to suggest that a strong-snouted animal could easily nose the door off its hinges. Upon communicating our fears to our host, we produced upon his grim visage the nearest approach to a smile that we had yet observed. He seemed entirely at his ease. He had strange tales, such as that one day he came home and found an old alligator asleep on his hearth; how that rattlesnakes had frequently crept in through the interstices of the logs; and how that almost every evening after dusk, at certain times of the year, wolves prowled around. Then our protector informed us that we must be stirring with the dawn. He would take us in his canoe a distance of ten miles, whence, by crossing a narrow tongue of land, we might reach a steamboat landing. With lively interest we watched his preparations for the night. He tried the wooden bar placed across the doorway. The logs were put together on the hearth. He then bade us wrap ourselves as well as we could in our buffalo robe; put out the lamp, and then lay full length on the floor, near the hearth, and was soon fast asleep. Wearied as I was, I could not sleep. The external noises grew louder and louder. The alligators waddled up and down the acclivity upon which the house stood. At one time no fewer than four of these ugly reptiles were prowling around our little sanctuary. Meantime, our host had fallen into the profoundest of slumbers, the audible proofs of which had in them some obscure consolation, for I could not but reason that a man who could sleep under such circumstances, and sleep so soundly, could not but be assured that there was no real ground for alarm. So the event proved. Confused thoughts of rattlesnakes, alligators, wolves, steamboats that devoured, and rattlesnakes that coughed and paddled, clouded my brain until I fell off into an uneasy slumber, gradually deepening into utter unconsciousness. When we awoke our host was standing in the open doorway, drying himself with a strip of canvas, after his matutinal wash in the river. He had put a can of water over the fire, and, bruising some coffee berries between two stones, he made us a not unacceptable beverage. Biscuits, coffee--without either sugar or milk--and the considerate relics in the iron pot from his last night’s supper, made our breakfast.