madness lay. There was a shore somewhere before me, and I must get to
it, by the ordinary means, before the ebb laid bare the flats, or swept
me below the lower bends of the stream. That was all.

Suddenly a light gleamed for an instant before me, as if from a house in
a grove of great trees upon a bank; and I knew that it came from the
window of a ruined plantation-building, where our most advanced outposts
had their head-quarters. The flash revealed to me every point of the
situation. I saw at once where I was, and how I got there: that the tide
had turned while I was swimming, and with a much briefer interval of
slack-water than I had been led to suppose,--that I had been swept a
good way down-stream, and was far beyond all possibility of regaining
the point I had left. Could I, however, retain my strength to swim one
or two hundred yards farther, of which I had no doubt, and if the water
did not ebb too rapidly, of which I had more fear, then I was quite
safe. Every stroke took me more and more out of the power of the
current, and there might even be an eddy. I could not afford to be
carried down much farther, for there the channel made a sweep toward
the wrong side of the river; but there was now no reason why this should
happen. I could dismiss all fear, indeed, except that of being fired
upon by our own sentinels, many of whom were then new recruits, and with
the usual disposition to shoot first and investigate afterwards.

I found myself swimming in shallow and shallower water, and the flats
seemed almost bare when I neared the shore, where the great gnarled
branches of the live-oaks hung far over the muddy bank. Floating on my
back for noiselessness, I paddled rapidly in with my hands, expecting
momentarily to hear the challenge of the picquet, and the ominous click
so likely to follow. I knew that some one should be pacing to and fro,
along that beat, but could not tell at what point he might be at that