Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his
face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to
words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them; the lonely
wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamor and
clapper-clawing; eyed the den of discord askance, and hurried on his
way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood,
he took what he considered a short cut homewards through the swamp.
Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly
grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet
high; which made it dark at noon-day, and a retreat for all the owls of
the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered
with weeds and mosses; where the green surface often betrayed the
traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and
stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the
water-snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned,
half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous
forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots which afforded
precarious footholds among deep sloughs; or pacing carefully, like a
cat, among the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the
sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of a wild duck, rising
on the wing from some solitary pool.
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