Many stories had been told me of the difficulties encountered even by the royal sportsmen of the realm, in their desire to obtain good specimens of wolves, boars and wild turkeys from the forest of Piron; and Armand de Nesselrode had been quoted in my presence as the most successful hunter that had been known to penetrate it. The floor of his hall at the château was covered with wolf-skins, the contemplation of which had more than once made me shudder as I thought of the risks he must have run in procuring them. Cave Charteris and he were constantly together at this time, shooting on horseback and on foot, and the bags of small game which the former used to bring home for our table proved that there were plenty of other marks in the forest besides those dangerous wolves and thrice dangerous wild boars. I knew the road to it well. It was lonely; but we never associated danger with loneliness at St. Pucelle; and at one point of it there stood a wayside shrine, a pretty, romantic, ruined piece of architecture, that I had sketched more than once, and from which a narrow path led through fields of grass and turnips back to my home again. The Piron road had not much in it to attract the eye before this little shrine was reached, and I walked along its side-path rapidly, as was my custom to walk when alone, with my eyes cast down and my brain working away as fast as it could go, at every subject that passed through it. I had left St. Pucelle a mile—perhaps a mile and a half—behind me, when something, I knew not what, impelled me suddenly to look up and scan the surrounding landscape. I had reached the centre of a long straight road, on either side of which ran a narrow footpath, fringed by the smallest of hedges, in many places trampled down by feet passing over it into the fields beyond. Not a tree sheltered the road anywhere, it was simply a highway to the next town. The dark mass of trees composing the forest loomed in the distance, but so far off as to appear like one clump against the greyish-blue sky of evening; behind me lay St. Pucelle, but I had placed a hill between us, and could only see the top of the spire of St. Marie and the wreaths of smoke that ascended from a little factory at the bottom of the town. I cast my eyes again in front. What was that dark figure advancing to meet me, that was sometimes in the light and sometimes in the shade, and seemed so uncertain in its movements and designs? Could it be a donkey? I smiled as the idea crossed my mind. How could a donkey slouch in that absurd manner, and move with a shuffling, trotting gait, as though its shoulders were higher than its head! But the next moment I had turned as pale as death, and my heart almost stopped its beating from terror. Could it be—was it possible it could be—_a wolf_?