And mighty woods which did the valley shade,
And like a stately theatre it made,
Spreading itself into a spacious plain;
And in the midst a little river played
Amongst the pumy stones and seemed to ‘plain
With gentle murmur that his course they did restrain.—Spenser.
The forest was almost impenetrably thick and intensely dark. The closely intermingling boughs overhead shut out every ray of starlight. And the moon had not yet risen. The darkness, the stillness and the silence of this wilderness was very solemn and almost appalling and overpowering. No object could be seen; they moved through thickest night and blackest shadow; nothing could be felt but the dampness of the air and the cold touch of the clustering leaves, and no sound could be heard but the muffled tread of their horses’ hoofs, the hoarse hoot of an owl, or the shrill cry of the whippowil.
Their progress through the forest was necessarily very slow, for the band was partly on foot, and the cavalry had to accommodate its pace to the infantry, whom it did not wish to leave behind. The path also was often so narrow and obstructed that they had to march in single file, Captain Bannister leading the way, followed by Colonel Rosenthal and a guard and young Wing, and another guard and Hay, and then the horse and lastly the foot.
After marching on in this tedious manner for nearly forty minutes, they came suddenly upon a picket guard so well concealed that though they—the pickets—could command the approach to their station, no one not familiar with their cover could suspect their presence there.
All in the darkness, the arriving band was challenged with the usual: