He knew he was nearing it now; the locality had been strongly impressed upon him even in the darkness of the previous evening.

He had passed the rocky ledge; his horse's hoofs no longer rang out clearly; slowly and perceptibly they grew deadened in the springy mosses, and were finally lost in the netted grasses and tangled vines that indicated the vicinity of the densely wooded hollow.

Here were already some of the wider spaced vanguards of that wood; but here, too, a peculiar circumstance struck him.

He was already descending the slight declivity; but the distance, instead of deepening in leafy shadow, was actually growing lighter.

Here were the outskirting sentinels of the wood--but the wood itself was gone! He spurred his horse through the tall arch between the opened columns, and pulled up in amazement.
The wood, indeed, was gone, and the whole hollow filled with the already black and dead stumps of the utterly consumed forest! More than that, from the indications before him, the catastrophe must have almost immediately followed his retreat from the hollow on the preceding night.