Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/399

352 deadly serpents and wild beasts; the old-time refuge of fugitive slaves, who preferred life in its lonely recesses to the life-in-death of the slave-quarter and the man-market. It is supposed by the outer world, and even by those who reside on its borders, to be a hopeless wilderness, an incurable ulcer on the earth's surface, a place that would have been long ago forgotten but for its shadowy romance,—for its depths were once enlightened, though it is over four-score years ago, by the undying song of a famous poet. Some of this evil character is true, but most of it is untrue, and much of the slander has not been accidental, but deliberate.

It is true that the hunted slave often heard the baying of the bloodhounds as he crouched in the cane-brake of the Dismal Swamp, or plunged into its central lake to break the trail, and true also that its hundreds of miles of waterlogged forest is infested with repulsive and deadly creatures, reptile and beast, bear, panther, wild-cat and snake; but it is not true that the Dismal Swamp is an irreclaimable wilderness, the pestilent source of miasma and malaria.

The Dismal Swamp is an agony of perverted nature. It is Andromeda, not waiting for the monster, but already in his grasp, broken and silent under the intolerable embrace.