Little St. Aubyn had been saved from death, and sustained during the past three months by a creature dumb like himself,--a large dog exactly resembling Fritz and Bruno. This dog, he gave us to understand, came from "over the torrent," indicating with a gesture the Arblen Valley; and, from the beginning of his troubles, had been to him like a human friend. The fall from the hillside had not seriously injured, but only bruised and temporarily lamed the lad, and after lying for a minute or two a little stunned and giddy, he rose and with some difficulty made his way across the meadow slope on which he found himself, expecting to meet his father descending the path. But he miscalculated its direction, and speedily discovered he had lost his way. After waiting a long time in great suspense, and seeing no one but a few goatherds at a distance, whose attention he failed to attract, the pain of a twisted ankle, increased by continual movement, compelled him to seek a night's shelter in the cave subsequently visited by his father at the suggestion of the peasants who assisted in the search. These peasants were not aware that the cave was but the mouth of a vast and wandering labyrinth tunneled, partly by nature and partly by art, through the rocky heart of the mountain. A little before sunrise, on the morning after his accident, the boy, examining with minute curiosity the picturesque grotto in which he had passed the night, discovered in its darkest corner a moss-covered stone behind which had accumulated a great quantity of weeds, ivy, and loose rubbish. Boylike, he fell to clearing away these impedimenta and excavating the stone, until, after some industrious labour thus expended, he dismantled behind and a little above it a narrow passage, into which he crept, partly to satisfy his love of "exploring," partly in the hope that it might afford him an egress in the direction of the village. The aperture thus exposed had not, in fact, escaped the eye of St. Aubyn, when about an hour afterwards the search for the lost boy was renewed. But one of his guides, after a brief inspection, declared the recess into which it opened empty, and the party, satisfied with his report, left the spot, little thinking that all their labor had been lost by a too hasty examination. For, in fact, this narrow and apparently limited passage gradually widened in its darkest part, and, as little St Aubyn found, became by degrees a tolerably roomy corridor, in which he could just manage to walk upright, and into which light from the outer world penetrated dimly through artificial fissures hollowed out at intervals in the rocky wall. Delighted at this discovery, but chilled by the vaultlike coldness of the place, the lad hastened back to fetch the fur mantle he had left in the cave, threw it over his shoulders, and returned to continue his exploration. The cavern gallery beguiled him with ever-new wonders at every step. Here rose a subterranean spring,