For a full hour, passion so completely mastered me that I could do nothing but revile fools and idiots of every shade and degree-- inveighing against mental imbecility as the height of human wickedness, and wondering why no one had ever suggested the propriety of having ‘naturals’ publicly whipped. I am shocked at myself now, as I call to mind the extravagance of my anger; and I grieve to say that had I been for that short interval the proprietor of a private madhouse, I fear I should have been betrayed into the most unwarrantable cruelties towards the patients; indeed, what is technically called ‘moral government’ would have formed no part of my system. Meanwhile time was moving on, if not pleasantly, at least steadily; and already the sun began to decline somewhat--his rays, that before came vertically, being now slanting as they fell upon the wood. For a while my attention was drawn off from my miseries by watching the weasels as they played and sported about me, in the confident belief that I was at best only a kind of fungus--an excrescence on an oak-tree. One of them came actually to my feet, and even ran across my instep in his play. Suddenly the thought ran through me--and with terror--how soon may it come to pass that I shall only be a miserable skeleton, pecked at by crows, and nibbled by squirrels! The idea was too dreadful; and as if the hour had actually come, I screamed out to frighten off the little creatures, and sent them back scampering into their dens. ‘Holloa there! what’s the matter?’ shouted a deep mellow voice from the middle of the wood; and before I could reply, a fat, rosy-cheeked man of about fifty, with a pleasant countenance terminating in a row of double chins, approached me, but still with evident caution, and halting when about five paces distant, stood still. ‘Who are you?’ said I hastily, resolving this time at least to adopt a different method of effecting my liberation. ‘What’s all this?’ quoth the fat man, shading his eyes with his palm, and addressing some one behind him, whom I now recognised as my friend the fool who visited me in the morning. ‘I say, sir,’ repeated I, in a tone of command somewhat absurd from a man in my situation, ‘who are you, may I ask?’ ‘The Maire de Givet,’ said he pompously, as he drew himself up, and took a large pinch of snuff with an imposing gravity, while his companion took off his hat in the most reverent fashion, and bowed down to the ground. ‘Well, Monsieur le Maire, the better fortune mine to fall into such hands. I have been robbed, and fastened here, as you see, by a gang of scoundrels’--I took good care to say nothing of smugglers--‘who have carried away everything I possessed. Have the goodness to loosen these confounded cords, and set me at liberty.’ ‘Were there many of them?’ quoth the mayor, without budging a step forward. ‘Yes, a dozen at least. But untie me at once. I’m heartily sick of being chained up here.’