It resembles as much as anything a dwarf pine tree, with a remarkably gnarled, crooked, and contorted trunk, growing horizontally like a neglected vine along the ground, and sending up perpendicular branches through the snow.

" As Heywood ended, they were entering a pastoral village, near the town, but hidden low under great trees, ancient and widely gnarled.

The mysterious "knees," those strange, naked, blackened roots, so wildly gnarled and twisted about the foot of the cypress, appeared to writhe out of the swamp's awful dimness like monstrous serpents seen in a dreadful dream.