Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announcing the approach
of another boat, which soon passed us, and proved to be a rusty old
scow,--just such a craft as the "Flying Dutchman" would navigate on
the canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage himself whom I
imperfectly distinguished at the helm in a glazed cap and rough
great-coat, with a pipe in his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a
hundred yards behind. Shortly after our boatman blew a horn,
sending a long and melancholy note through the forest avenue, as a
signal for some watcher in the wilderness to be ready with a change
of horses. We had proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team when
the tow-rope got entangled in a fallen branch on the edge of the
canal, and caused a momentary delay, during which I went to examine
the phosphoric light of an old tree a little within the forest. It
was not the first delusive radiance that I had followed.

The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass
of diseased splendor, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full
of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light,
illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the
dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its
brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike
torches were just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze
coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the
canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering
far away.

"Boat ahoy!" shouted I, making a trumpet of my closed fists.

Though the cry must have rung for miles along that hollow passage of
the woods, it produced no effect. These packet-boats make up for