Malindy Taylor had sometimes heard some terrible noises from the direction of the point, but she was too far away to be much disturbed. Both Posey and Wirrick had often referred to Malindy as “an old fuss-bug,” although she was much younger than either of them, and they probably would not have cared if they had scared her out of the country, but she had little curiosity about things that did not affect her duck farm. She and her mother had concluded that the uncanny sounds were produced by donkeys in the woods, and doubtless this was also the opinion of most of those who afterwards learned all of the facts. When Rat emerged from his retirement at the duck farm, he spent two or three days puttering about through the water openings, setting his traps. The furred inhabitants of the slough had builded their picturesque little domes of stringy roots, rushes, and dead grass, and plastered them together with lumps of mud in the quiet places, away from the river currents that crept in sinuous and broken channels through the broad wastes of sodden labyrinths. Hyatt was an intelligent trapper, and was careful not to depopulate his grounds. He frequently moved the traps, so as not to exhaust the animals in a particular locality. The little competition he had on the marsh must have been discouraging to his rivals, for he always had more traps at the end of the season than at its beginning, and the traps set by others never seemed to be very productive, except to Hyatt. By degrees each new comer was eliminated. Rat had finished a hard day’s work. He sat on some dry grass in the bottom of his canoe, lighted a redolent old pipe, and decided to indulge in a good smoke and a long rest before starting up the river. Twilight had come. The vast expanse of overgrown water was silent, except for the low lullabies of the marsh birds among the thick grasses and bulrushes. He sat for a long time and watched the smoke curl up into the still air. The moon came over the distant rim of the forest that bordered the great marsh, and one by one, the stars began to tremble in the crystal sky, but it was not with the eye of the poet that Rat regarded these things. The moonlighted river would be easy to navigate on the trip home. Suddenly a flash of greenish light shot into the heavens in the north west, and in a few minutes the entire horizon in every direction flamed and shimmered with long gleaming streamers of rose and green beams that touched fluttering segments of a corona of orange glow at the zenith. Rat had often seen the Aurora Borealis; he was familiar with sheet lightning, and the electrical discharges of the thunder storms, but this awful light was something new. It was a magnetic storm, one of those rare phenomena, that the average person sees but once in a life time, and never forgets, caused by the sudden incandescence of heavily charged solar dust in the earth’s atmosphere.