ecame more abundant, and the
bathers, walking below on the greensward, saw a human skeleton as
white as snow fall from the cascade.

You may judge, Master Frantz, of the general fright; it was thought
naturally that a murder had been committed at Spinbronn in a recent
year, and that the body of the victim had been thrown in the spring.
But the skeleton weighed no more than a dozen francs, and Haselnoss
concluded that it must have sojourned more than three centuries in the
sand to have become reduced to such a state of desiccation.

This very plausible reasoning did not prevent a crowd of patrons, wild
at the idea of having drunk the saline water, from leaving before the
end of the day; those worst afflicted with gout and gravel consoled
themselves. But the overflow continuing, all the rubbish, slime, and
detritus which the cavern contained was disgorged on the following
days; a veritable bone-yard came down from the mountain: skeletons of
animals of every kind--of quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles--in short,
all that one could conceive as most horrible.

Haselnoss issued a pamphlet demonstrating that all these bones were
derived from an antediluvian world: that they were fossil bones,
accumulated there in a sort of funnel during the universal flood--that
is to say, four thousand years before Christ, and that, consequently,
one might consider them as nothing but stones, and that it was
needless to be disgusted. But his work had scarcely reassured the
gouty when, one fine morning, the corpse of a fox, then that of a hawk
with all its feathers, fell from the cascade.

It was impossible to establish that these remains antedated the Flood.
Anyway, the disgust was so great that everybody tied up his bundle and
went to take the waters elsewhere.

"How infamous!" cried the beautiful ladies--"how horrible! So that's
what the virtue of these mineral waters came from! Oh, 'twere better
to die of gravel than continue such a remedy!"

At the end of a week there remained at Spinbronn only a big Englishman
who had gout in his hands as well as in his feet, who had himself
addressed as Sir Thomas Hawerburch, Commodore; and he brought a large
retinue, according to the usage of a British subject in a foreign
land.

This personage, big and fat, with a florid complexion, but with hands
simply knotted with gout, would have drunk skeleton soup if it would
have cured his infirmity. He laughed heartily over the desertion of
the other suf