"Ole Billy Thornton's ole house," answered the youth. "But this is not, I think, the road that poor Hercules intended me to take?" I added, interrogatively. "Dar say he meant the waggon-road; but it is all de same," replied the lad. "Dey both come out close together, and dat ar gal jog her turn dis way. I see her, dough she were mighty quick." And he laughed with the peculiar laugh of his people. "Then I cannot miss my way to the old place," I observed. "Oh, dear, no," answered the boy; "only just follow de track; keep always de biggest; and when you ride 'cross de savannah, look where him very green. Don't you go dere, for he's very deep dere. But keep where him brown and bushy, and where you see ox or horse feet." His directions were very good, as I found afterwards; although I will confess that I had no idea at the time of the sort of place I was venturing into, called, and not without reason, "The Great Dismal Swamp." I am told that in the spring of the year, nothing can be more deceitfully beautiful than the aspect which it puts on. The whole ground, even in the most plashy places, is covered with flowers. The trees are literally robed and loaded with the yellow jasmine, the trumpet honey-suckle, and other climbing plants. The cedars and junipers mingle their darker colours with the light-green foliage of the spring; and the very snakes as they glide across the path, or curl among the branches, look as if they were masses of living gems. In the height of summer, or the beginning of autumn, the scene is very different. Still, however, there is something grand about it from its very gloom. A profound sense of loneliness came upon me as I rode on. I don't know what it was, or how to account for the feeling, but the sensation produced by the aspect of these woods was different from that of any other forest scenery through which I had passed in Virginia. Where patches of woodland, very often of considerable extent, had been scattered amongst the cultivated ground, one always felt that one should soon reach free air and human associations again; but here, it seemed as if one were at the end of man's domain--as if the ground one trod upon never had been, never could be, cultivated; that there was a bar, and a proscription, and a curse against it--that one was proceeding away from civilization, and tending towards nothing. The first half-mile was through dense, deep forest, with tall, thin trees, rising up so close together that they evidently had not room to glow; each struggling with his fellow, as, in too densely a crowded population, every man stinted his neighbour in his own struggle for life.