228 THE WILD. 



evening. They attribute the voice to some supernatural 

 creature of formidable size and powers, which is supposed 

 to reside at the bottom of the fens, and which they call 

 the Ball-o'-the-bog. The sound is sufficiently awful to 

 excuse the error. 



The dreary cypress-swamps of the Southern United 

 States i^ossess a bird closely allied to our bittern, whose 

 voice, though destitute of the volume of the European 

 bird, is startlmg enough to hear in its savage solitudes. 

 Nothing can be more dismal, even by day, than the in- 

 terior of one of those swamps, — half-tepid, stagnant water 

 covering the ground, the dense timber trees, a hundred 

 feet in height, whose opaque and sombre-hued foliage 

 almost shuts out the sky, while the gaunt horizontal 

 branches are hung with far-pendent ragged bundles of 

 Spanish moss,* the very type of dreariness and desolation. 

 Such trees remind one of an army of skeletons, giants of 

 some remote age, still standing where they had lived, and 

 still wearing the decaying tatters of the robes which they 

 had worn of old. At night, however, these forests are 

 invested with tenfold gloom, and imagination peoj^les the 

 palpable blackness and silence with all sorts of horrors, 

 as the eye vainly attempts to peer into their depths ; 

 while ever and anon, the melancholy " quah ! " hoarse and 

 hollow, booms out from the solitude, chilling one's spirit, 

 as if it were the voice of the presiding demon of the place. 

 Not in vain have the inspired Prophets-f* made use of the 

 bittern as one of the elements in their delineations of 



* Tillandsia usneoides. f Isa. xiv. 23, xxxiv. 11; Zeph. ii. 14, 



