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e yard. This most useful reinforcement with their vigorous attacks and loud barking completed the tumult and the tragedy. In twenty minutes the eight wolves were dead, and with them half the faithful dogs. The poor unfortunate lad, his throat torn open, was dead; his courageous, though unsuccessful defenders, were all more or less wounded, and the gallant farmer's left hand so injured, that as soon as surgical assistance could be procured for him, amputation was found to be necessary. The monsters, stretched side by side in the yard, were also stone dead, every one of them; but not a voice on the farm raised the heart-stirring shout of victory. Consternation and gloom reigned over it, and it was long indeed ere the voice of mourning deserted its walls. The skin of the wolf is strong and durable; the woodmen, _braconniers_, and mountaineers, make cloaks and caps of it, the tail being left on the latter to fall over the ear by way of ornament; they likewise cover with it the outside of their game-bags. They tan it also, and excellent shoes are made of the leather, soft and light for summer wear,--it is likewise made into parchment, not to write the history of their ancestors upon, but to cover small drums, the rattle of which, on fairdays and _fetes_ is sure to set the peasants dancing. This fact is alluded to in a song of our province, written by a shepherd-poet, in the pleasing dialect of Le Morvan, of which the following is a free translation: Hark! 'tis the wolf-skin drum, We come! We come! Yes, come with me sweet girl, and fair As rosebud wild that scents the air. The heavens are bright, the stars are shining, Thy lovely form my arms entwining; Together let us lead the dance Deep in thy sylvan haunts, dear France! Hark! I hear those sounds again, The wolf-skin drum, the pipers' strain. Wealthy persons use a wolf-skin for a carriage-rug, and in the rainy season as a mat at the door of a room. "There is nothing good in the wolf," says Buffon, "he has a base low look--a savage aspect, a terrible voice, an insupportable smell, a nature brutal and ferocious, and a body so foul and unclean that no animal or reptile will touch his flesh. It is only a wolf that can eat a wolf." "No animal," writes Cuvier, "so richly merits destruction as the wolf." With these two funeral orations on these incarnate fiends of Natural History, I shall close this chapter, remarkin
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