The Illegal Marriage — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

6 THE ILLEGAL MAKRIAGE each producing its peculiar effect upon the mind of man—each having a marked influence upon even the beasts of the field. Sometimes the sun goes down a blood-red disk behind a vail of purplish-blue haze, in which, an hour later, hangs the somber new moon, slowly dipping its crescent down toward the pines. The air is heavy and still, thousands of frogs make the evening melodious with their pipings, while the song of the mocking-bird is exchanged for the plaintive notes of the whip-poor-will. This state of the atmosphere is particularly ob- served along the Echaconnee—a stream bordered with dank, heavy swamps, home of the alligator and deadly moccasin—which runs through, and forms a part of the dividing lne between the counties of Bibb, Crawford, and Houston. At such times a presentiment of trouble, or a nameless feeling of coming ill, seems to pervade the atmosphere, having a wonderfully depressing effect upon the mind. On a night like this, some few years ago, Mr. William Stannard—a man of five-and-thirty, and a large planter in the county of Houston—sat on the ‘veranda of his house, slowly puffing his Havana in the shadow of a large magnolia. Very quiet he sat, moving only now and then when he indolently took the cigar from his mouth and blew out a long cloud of smoke. | It was a calm and graceful picture which was there presented. Perhaps Mr. Stannard—or Colonel Stannard as he should be called—was not one who would be generally termed “a very handsome man,” yet there was something about him which never failed to attract a second glance, 7”. Gomicbooks.co