s if to regulate the busy activity that has sprung up in this spot
once set apart for eternal slumber. Only the old people who sit on the
planks, basking in the setting sun, speak occasionally among themselves
of the bones which they once saw carted through the streets of Plassans
by the legendary tumbrel.

When night falls the Aire Saint-Mittre loses its animation, and looks
like some great black hole. At the far end one may just espy the dying
embers of the gipsies' fires, and at times shadows slink noiselessly
into the dense darkness. The place becomes quite sinister, particularly
in winter time.

One Sunday evening, at about seven o'clock, a young man stepped lightly
from the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and, closely skirting the walls, took
his way among the timber in the wood-yard. It was in the early part of
December, 1851. The weather was dry and cold. The full moon shone with
that sharp brilliancy peculiar to winter moons. The wood-yard did not
have the forbidding appearance which it wears on rainy nights; illumined
by stretches of white light, and wrapped in deep and chilly silence, it
spread around with a soft, melancholy aspect.

For a few seconds the young man paused on the edge of the yard and gazed
mistrustfully in front of him. He carried a long gun, the butt-end of
which was hidden under his jacket, while the barrel, pointed towards the
ground, glittered in the moonlight. Pressing the weapon to his side, he
attentively examined the square shadows cast by the piles of timber. The
ground looked like a chess-board, with black and white squares clearly
defined by alternate patches of light and shade. The sawyers' tressels
in the centre of the plot threw long, narrow fantastic shadows,
suggesting some huge geometrical figure, upon a strip of bare grey
ground. The rest of the yard, the flooring of beams, formed a great
couch on which the light reposed, streaked here and there with the
slender black shadows which edged the different pieces of timber. In the
frigid silence under the wintry moon, the motionless, recumbent poles,
stiffened, as it were, with sleep and cold, recalled the corpses of
the old cemetery. The young man cast but a rapid glance round the empty
space; there was not a creature, not a sound, no danger of being seen or
heard. The black patches at the further end caused him more anxiety, but
after a brief examination he plucked up courage and hurriedly crossed
the wood-yard.

As soon as he felt hi