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“Confound that foolish Mercury!” he cried. “At this moment I ought to have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of smoking hot coffee, while I am winding up my chapter upon the ancient armoury at Nideck. Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes, stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke my neck! There!–I said so! Was that a tree I knocked against? A hundred thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect, who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up! I’ll lay any wager that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced and corroded bit of stone, without either nose or legs–some shapeless deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal. Oh, you architects! you architects!–you are always finding antiquities everywhere. Luckily I had not my spectacles on, or I should have smashed them against that tree; but now I shall be obliged to find a bed somewhere among the bushes. What a road this is!–nothing but ruts, and holes, and pits, and loose rocks and boulders!”

In one of those moments when the good man, getting exhausted, was stopping for breath, he thought he could hear the grating of a saw far down the valley. What was his joy when he became certain that it was that!

“Heaven be praised!” he cried, plucking up his spirits; “now to push on with halting steps. Now I shall get a little rest. What a lesson this will be for me! Providence had compassion upon my rheumatism. What an old fool to go and expose myself to have to lie out in the woods at my time of life, to ruin my health and undermine my constitution! I shall remember this! Never shall I forget this warning!”

In a quarter of an hour the noise of falling water became more distinct; then a faint light broke through the trees. Maitre Bernard then found himself at the top of the wood; he observed below the heath a stream running down the winding valley as far as he could see, and just before him the saw-mill, with its long dark posts and beams crossing and recrossing in the gloom like a huge spider.

He crossed the high-arched bridge over the rushing dam, and looked through the little window into the woodman’s hut.

It was a low, dark shed leaning against a hollow in the rock. At the farther end of the natural cavity was a small pile of smouldering sawdust. In the front the boarded roof, weighted with heavy stones, descended to within three feet of the ground; in a corner at the right, a kind of box, full of dried heather; a few logs of oak, an axe, a massive bench, and other implements of toil, were lost in the shade. A resinous odour of pine-wood impregnated the air, and the ruddy smoke eddied through a fissure in the rock.

Whilst the good man was observing these objects, the woodman, coming out from the mill, saw him, and cried–

“Halloo!–who is that?”

“I beg your pardon; pray pardon me,” said my worthy uncle, rather startled. “I am a traveller who has lost his way.”

“Hey!” cried the other man; “good guide us! Is not that Maitre Bernard, of Saverne? You are very welcome indeed, Maitre Bernard. Don’t you know me?”

“No, indeed! How should I in this dark night?”

“Parbleu!–of course not! But I am Christian; I bring you your contraband snuff every fortnight. But come in, come in! We will soon get a light.”

They passed stooping under the little low door, and the woodman, having lighted a pine-torch, stuck it into a split iron rod to serve as a candlestick, and a bright light, clear and white as moonshine, filled the hut, lighting up every corner of it.