"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."

"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same woman! where did you get this pass?"

"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."

His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon started south.

"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy Hudson for assisting a runaway!"

"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only road!"

He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the swampy branch.

"What have you done?" cried Virgie.

"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."

With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the reptile.

Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal dream.

The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each insist upon the last word to say:

"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you didn't!" "You did, you did!"

Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born, had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night, till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan disputing for her soul.

As this idea increased upon her fancy she heard the very words these warring powers hurled to and fro, as now the myriads of the angels cheered together, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" and, like an army of spiders, assembled in the swamp, a deep refrain of "Hell, hell, hell!" groaned back.

"Hallelujah!" "Hell!" "Hallelujah!"

She found herself crying, as she stumbled on, "Hallelujah! hallelujah!"

The swamp increased in depth and solemnity as they drew near the rushing sluices of the Pocomoke, and kept along them, the trail being now a mere ditch and chain of floating logs where no vehicle could pass, and the man himself seemed frightened as he led the way from trunk to float and puddle to corduroy, sometimes balancing himself on a revolving log, or again plunging nearly to his waist in vegetable muck; but the light-footed girl behind had the footstep of a bird, and hopped as if from twig to twig, and seemed to slide where he would sink; and the man often turned in terror, when he had fallen headlong from some treacherous perch, to see her slender feet, in crescent sandals, play in the moonlit jungle like hands upon a harp.