VIRGIE'S FLIGHT (_continued_).
"Can you walk, Hudson?" asked Virgie, when her horror would permit.
"Yes, child, I can walk, I reckon; but both my eyes is burned out. Oh,
my pore old wife: she could nurse me so well. I have lost her."
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.
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