curious inquirer sees only a naked stalk of grey-green
grass.

The Count pulled his hat over his eyes and returned whence he came, but
shortened the way by striding over the vegetables, the flowers, and the
gooseberry bushes, until, vaulting the fence, he at last breathed freely!
He remembered that he had spoken to the girl of breakfast: so perhaps
everybody was already informed of his meeting with her in the garden, near
the house; perhaps they would send to look for him. Had they noticed his
flight? Who knows what they would think? So he had to go back. Bending
down near the fence, along the boundary strip, and through the weeds,
after a thousand turns he was glad to come out finally on the highway,
which led straight to the yard of the mansion. He walked along the fence
and turned away his head from the garden as a thief from a corn house, in
order to give no sign that he thought of visiting it, or had already done
so. Thus careful was the Count, though no one was following him; he looked
in the opposite direction from the garden, to the right.

Here was an open grove, with a floor of turf; over this green carpet,
among the white trunks of the birches, under the canopy of luxuriant
drooping boughs, roamed a multitude of forms, whose strange dance-like
motions and strange costumes made one think them ghosts, wandering by the
light of the moon. Some were in tight black garments, others in long,
flowing robes, bright as snow; one wore a hat broad as a hoop, another was
bare-headed; some, as if they had been wrapt in a cloud, in walking spread
out on the breeze veils that trailed behind their heads as the tail behind
a comet. Each had a different posture: one had grown into the earth, and
only turned about his downcast eyes; another, looking straight before him,
as if in a dream, seemed to be walking along a line, turning neither to
the right nor to the left. But all continually bent down to the ground in
various directions, as if making deep bows. If they approached one
another, or met, they did not speak or exchange greetings, being in deep
meditation, absorbed in themselves. In them the Count saw an image of the
shades in the Elysian Fields, who, not subject to disease or care, wander
calm and quiet, but gloomy.

Who would have guessed that these people, so far from lively and so
silent, were our friends, the Judge's comrades? From the noisy breakfast
they had gone out to the solemn ceremony of mushroom-gathering; be