Page:Fifty Years in Chains, or the Life of an American Slave.djvu/258

256 and the light trampling of my own footsteps, the stillness of night pervaded the lonely wastes around me. But there is a deep melancholy in the sound of the heavy drop as it meets the bosom of the wave in a dense forest at night, that revives in the memory the recollection of the days of other years, and fills the heart with sadness.

I was now approaching the unhallowed ground where lay the remains of the remorseless and guilty dead, who had gone to their final account, reeking in their sins, unatoned, unblest and unwept. Already I saw the bones, whitened by the rain and bleached in the sun, lying scattered and dispersed, a leg here and an arm there, while a scull with the under jaw in its place, retaining all its teeth, grinned a ghastly laugh, with its front full in the beams of the moon, which, falling into the vacant sockets of the eye-balls, reflected a pale shadow from these deserted caverns, and played in twinkling lustre upon the bald and skinless forehead.

In a moment, the night-breeze agitated the leaves of the wood and moaned in dreary sighs through the lofty pine tops ; the gale shook the forest in the depth of its solitudes: a cloud swept across the moon, and her light disappeared ; a flock of carrion crows disturbed in their roosts, flapped their wings and fluttered over my head ; and a wolf, who had been knawing