"The Lord has punished me for my wickedness," he groaned. "Virgie, you must lead me now; I am gone blind."
Chapter XXXIX.
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. Such a fire they had come through.
Virgie, in the early daylight, came upon a small, swarthy boy, driving a little cart and ox.