The girl comforted the sightless man, and led him on, indifferent to danger. He waded the deep places, where the water soothed his wounds and filled his blistered sockets with cool mud.

"Blessed is the pure in heart," he murmured, as they reached some sandy ground and sank down. "You, Virgie, can see God; I never can."

The great Cypress Swamp of Delaware - counterpart of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia - the northern border of which they had now reached, had probably been once a great inlet or shallow bay in the encroaching sand-bar of the peninsula, and was filled with oysters and fish, which in time were imprisoned and became the manure of a cypress forest that soon started up when springs of water flowed under the sand and moistened the seed; and for ages these forests had been growing, and had been prostrated, and had dropped their leaves and branches in the great inlet's bed, until a deep ligneous mass of combustible stuff raised higher and higher the level of the swamp, and, dried with ages more of time than dried the mummies of the Pharaohs, it often opened tunnels to burrowing fire, which at some point of its course belched forth and lighted the hollow trees, and raged for weeks. Such a fire they had come through.

Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a little cart and ox.

"Are you a colored boy?" Virgie asked.

"No," answered the boy, proudly. "I'm Indian-river Indian; reckon I'm a little nigger."

"Take this poor man in and I will pay you. Where are you going?"

"To Dagsborough landing, for salt."

"Leave me at Dagsborough, at the old Clayton house," spoke up the blind man; "it's empty. I can die thar or git a doctor."

Before the people were up they entered a little hamlet, on that stage road from which they had made the night's detour, and saw a few small houses and a little shingle-boarded church near by among the woods, and one large house of a deserted appearance was at the town's extremity. The man said, "This is John M. Clayton's birthplace: my wife used to work yer."

"Virgie!" exclaimed a familiar voice.

The girl turned, her ears still ringing with the echoes of the swamp, and saw a face she knew, and ran to the breast beneath it, crying,

"Samson Hat! Oh, friend, love me like my mother. I am very ill."

"Pore, darlin' child," Samson said; "no love will I ever bodder you wid agin but a father's. Why air you so fur from home?"

"I'm sold, Samson: I'm trying to get free. The kidnappers is after me. Oh, save me!"

"I've jist got away from 'em, Virgie. The ole woman, Patty Cannon, set me free. I promised her I would kidnap somebody younger dan ole Samson. Bless de Lord! I come dis way!"

He led her into the oak-trees of the old church grove, where English worship had been celebrated just a hundred years; and she gave him money to buy medicine and get a doctor for the blind man, and to purchase her a shawl at the store. Then Virgie sank into a fevered sleep under the old oak-trees, and, when she knew more, was gliding in a boat that Samson was sailing down a broad piece of water, and her head was in his lap.