Then came a track, where I know not what catastrophe seemed to have terminated this overcrowded contention. For three or four square miles, the scene was one of desolation and decay. Fallen trees, stunted bushes, low junipers, plashy pools, thickets of laurel and ivy, silver gleams of small ponds, scanty lines of savannah--here, a dried-up patch of black mud, cracked into deep fissures; there, an undrainable spot, where the horse sank above his knees at every step in slimy ooze; now, a tangled brake, where a hundred men might have concealed themselves; and now, a swampy piece, from the long grass of which a tall white bird would spring up and soar away,--such were the objects that presented themselves on every side; and when viewed from the rather more elevated ground, by which the track was approached, showed like a wild and dismal moor with here and there a clump of tall trees rising above the rest of the expanse, and a deep, lowering belt of forest in the distance, girding it in on every side. On I rode, however, my horse sometimes stumbling over the thorn-trees, sometimes sinking almost to his girths in the deep, black mud. The sun declining in the sky, and the gloomy aspect of everything round me, sank into my heart, and depressed my spirits. Oh, how closely allied in this mysterious state of being is the material and the moral--how susceptible is even the soul itself of the influences poured in upon it through the channels of the external senses! The memories of all that had been taking place during the last two days seemed to combine themselves with the gloomy features of the scene around me. Hope diminished, apprehension increased. Imagination triumphed over reason; and I felt as if I were going on towards sorrow and disappointment and misfortunes. Such gloomy fits have sometimes possessed me before; but it is man's privilege and his duty to triumph over them; and whenever I feel the shadow of the cloud, I try to nerve my heart to resist, and to call up faith and trust to support mere human resolution. "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." "Not a hair of our head falls to the ground unnumbered." And if so, God is with us. Onward! CHAPTER XXXIII.