me on the
surfaces of the smooth pools. Elated by the sudden brightness, the white
stallion resumed his journey at a gallop, straight toward the sunset,
his long mane and tail, now dry, streaming out on the light afternoon
breeze that drew down between the hills. He kept on up the valley till
the sun went down, and then, in the swiftly deepening twilight, came to
a little grassy point backed by a steep rock. Here where the rippling of
the water enclosed him on three sides, and the rock, with a thick mass
of hemlocks, surmounting it, shut him in on the fourth, he felt more
secure, less desolate, than when surrounded by the endless corridors of
the forest; and close to the foot of the rock he lay down, facing the
mysterious gloom of the trees across the stream.

Just as he was settling himself, a strange voice, hollow yet muffled,
cried across the open space "_Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo!_" and he
bounded to his feet, every nerve on the alert. He had never in his life
before heard the voice of the great horned owl, and his apprehensive
wonder was excusable. Again and yet again came the hollow call out of
the deep dark of the banked woods opposite. As he stood listening
tensely, eyes and nostrils wide, a bat flitted past his ears, and he
jumped half around, with a startled snort. The ominous sound, however,
was not repeated, and in a couple of minutes he lay down again, still
keeping watchful eyes upon the dark mass across the stream. Then, at
last, a broad-winged bird, taking shape softly above the open, as
noiseless as a gigantic moth, floated over him, and looked down upon him
under his rock with round, palely luminous eyes. By some quick intuition
he knew that this visitor was the source of the mysterious call. It was
only a bird, after all, and no great thing in comparison with the eagles
of his own Pyrenean heights. His apprehensions vanished, and he settled
himself to sleep.

Worn out with days and nights of strain and terror, the exile slept
soundly. Soon, under the crisp autumn starlight, a red fox crept down
circumspectly to hunt mice in the tangled dry grasses of the point. At
sight of the strange white form sleeping carelessly at the foot of the
rock he bounded back into cover, startled quite out of his philosophic
composure. He had never before seen any such being as that; and the
smell, too, was mysterious and hostile to his wrinkling fastidious
nostrils. Having eyed the newcomer for some time from his hid