What are some of the characteristic of the setting of the book "The Devil and Tom Walker"?

The story takes place near a swamp, thickly grown with trees and hemlocks. The atmosphere is somewhat spooky.... dark, even in the middle of the afternoon. Pools of mud might drag one under, pits were dangerous, and snakes, frogs, and owls hid in the recesses.

The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high; which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighbourhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses; where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water snake, and where trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators, sleeping in the mire.