THE WILD. 



marsh in the stillness of the evening. They at- 

 tribute 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 Bull-o'-the-bog. The sound is sufficiently 

 awful to excuse the error. 



The dreary cypreas-swamps of the Southern 

 United States possess a bird closely allied to our 

 bittern, whose voice, though destitute of the 

 volume of the European bird, is startling enough 

 to hear in its savage solitudes. Nothing can be 

 more dismal, even by day, than the interior 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 re- 

 mind 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 peoples 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 "quab.1" 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 Proph- 

 etst made use of the bittern as one of the elements 

 in their delineations of awful and utter desolation. 

 Take for an example the denunciation upon Idu- 

 mea, in Isa. xxxiv.:— 



* Tillandsia usneoides. 

 + Isa. xiv. 23, xxxiv. 11 ; Zeph. ii. H. 

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