Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/129

Rh all sorts and sizes, that hour, in the apartment so occupied, was grotesque enough. One figure alone, sitting in the midst and musing with a concentrated mind, gave dignity to the ludicrous grouping—the majestic figure of Mary Granger, her dark eye fixed upon the silent and sleeping collection in doubt and pity, her black hair bound closely upon her head, and her broad forehead seeming to enlarge and grow with the busy thought at work within it. Her hand, too—strange association—rested upon a hatchet.…

The watchers of the fortress, from their several loopholes, looked forth, east and west, yet saw no enemy. All was soft in the picture, all was silent in the deep repose of the forest. The night was clear and lovely, and the vague and dim beauty with which, in the imperfect moonlight, the foliage of the woods spread away in distant shadows or clung and clustered together as in groups, shrinking for concealment from her glances, touched the spirits even of those rude foresters. With them the poetry of the natural world is a matter of feeling; with the refined it is an instrument of art. Hence it is, indeed, that the poetry of the early ages speaks in the simplest language, while that of civilization, becoming only the agent for artificial enjoyment, is ornate in its dress and complex in its form and structure.

The night wore on, still calm and serene in all its aspects about the Block House. Far away in the distance, like glimpses of a spirit, little sweeps of the river in its crooked windings flashed upon the eye, streaking with a sweet relief the somber foliage of the swampy forest through which it stole. A single note—the melancholy murmur of the chuck-will's-widow, the Carolina whippoorwill—broke fitfully upon the silence, to which it gave an added solemnity. That single note indicated to the keepers of the fortress a watchfulness corresponding with their own, of another living creature. Whether it were human