nder which he then stood were so new to him, that he was
quite unmanned and incapable of further exertion.

In blood-red streaks sank the setting sun, his large yellow orb glancing
through the trees like the dimmed eye of some giant ogre; twilight came,
and soon after every valley lay in shadow; the breeze, as if waking from
its gentle slumbers, whistled in the highest branches, and, increasing
in force, rocked the lower limbs, which moaned mournfully as the night
closed in.

Hungry and alarmed, and now quite worn out with his lengthened walk, the
young Parisian lay stretched on the moss, listening with painful anxiety
to this melancholy conversation of the woods, when, suddenly, and as
night fell, spreading over the earth her sable wings and shaking from
the folds of her robe the luminous legions of stars, he heard a
prolonged and sonorous howl in the distance--a strolling wolf--

"Cruel as Death! and hungry as the grave!
Burning for blood! bony and gaunt and grim,"

had scented the Parisian and was inviting his good friends with the long
teeth, to come and sup on the dainty morsel. Touched as if by a hot
iron, up got the terrified youth, and striking his ten nails into the
friendly tree near him like an Indian monkey, he was in an instant many
feet above its base. Here, astride upon a branch, shivering and shaking,
each hair on end, and murmuring many a Pater and Ave Maria, unsaid for
years, he passed the most horrific night that any citizen of the
department of the Seine had ever been known to spend in the middle of
the forest of Erveau.

The following morning, but not until the sun had already run nearly
half his course, for he never dared to leave his timber observatory
before, _le pauvre diable_ dropped down from his perch like an
acorn--and, marching off with weary steps, and scarcely a hope that ere
another night fell he should gain the shelter of some cottage, he
dragged himself along. On he rolled from side to side, torn with the
thorns and bitten by the gnats that swarmed around him, sometimes
calling upon his mother, sometimes upon the saints--when a wood-cutter
happily met, and seeing his exhausted condition, threw the slim student
over his shoulders like a bundle of straw, and carried him to a
neighbouring village. There, he was put to bed and attended with every
care, when he soon recovered--and received the charming intelligence
that he was about forty miles from his uncle's house--that he had b