Mississippians near the Summit, of whom, through their native gambling
proclivities, he was professionally cognizant. But he mainly trusted
Fortune. Secure in his faith in the feminine character of that goddess,
he relied a great deal on her well-known weakness for scamps of his
quality.

It was not long before he came to the "slide"--a lightly-cut or shallow
ditch. It descended slightly in a course that was far from straight, at
times diverging to avoid the obstacles of trees or boulders, at times
shaving them so closely as to leave smooth abrasions along their sides
made by the grinding passage of long logs down the incline. The track
itself was slippery from this, and preoccupied all Hamlin's skill as a
horseman, even to the point of stopping his usual careless whistle.
At the end of half an hour the track became level again, and he was
confronted with a singular phenomenon.

He had entered the wood, and the trail seemed to cleave through a
far-stretching, motionless sea of ferns that flowed on either side to
the height of his horse's flanks. The straight shafts of the trees rose
like columns from their hidden bases and were lost again in a roof
of impenetrable leafage, leaving a clear space of fifty feet between,
through which the surrounding horizon of sky was perfectly visible.
All the light that entered this vast sylvan hall came from the sides;
nothing permeated from above; nothing radiated from below; the height
of the crest on which the wood was placed gave it this lateral
illumination, but gave it also the profound isolation of some temple
raised by long-forgotten hands. In spite of the height of these clear
shafts, they seemed dwarfed by the expanse of the wood, and in the
farthest perspective the base of ferns and the capital of foliage
appeared almost to meet. As the boy had warned him, the slide had turned