singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting
and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore.

Hoary willows, dark alders, and then the road. This led me to Le Buisson--a
place possessed of the blue devils, and which exists merely out of
compliment to the railway-junction here. Having made arrangements for
returning to the inn, I wandered out again to look at the river in the gray
evening, and at the bridge where it was predicted that I should go to
the bottom if I remained in the little boat. I crossed fields from which
tobacco and maize had lately been carried, and reached the bridge of evil
prophecy. The river certainly seemed to be doing its best to sweep away the
piers, and when it escaped from the arches it raised its voice to a roar;
but it seemed to me that on one side the _perissoire_ would have gone
through gaily without being swamped. The cry of troubled water in the dusk
fascinated me. I lingered, and yet felt the strong impulse to hurry back to
the society of men, out of the sound of the angry river, whose slaty waves
flashed out strange gleams. What is it in the gloom and horror of nature
that so draws us and yet warns us to flee? The day was ending stormily. The
poplars wailed, and bent under the lash of the rising wind; dark masses of
cloud stood still in the sky, whilst others, torn and scattered below them,
rushed hither and thither madly. Every few minutes the faint gleam of
lightning, still far off, brought to the black woods along the hills a
momentary return of radiance, as though it were the fitful flashing of the
day's dying lamp.

The roaring and wailing of the turbid flood now seemed to be repeating in
cruel mockery the despairing cries of all the drowning people who were ever
the prey of the water-fiends that draw downward in whirlpools to depths
where twilight passes into darkness, and take the form of the long waving
weeds that look so innocent, but whose grasp is deadly, or guide the