Another night, Mr. Mauger, of Saints’, wanting to go and see his brother at the Villette, took the short cut, which is a tiny lane next to a little shop at the top of the Icart-road, and which comes out nearly opposite “Le Coin de la Biche.” He was carrying a torch of “gllic” (glui[135]--thick straw and resin), and felt that, thus armed, nothing could attack him. As he turned into the lane, he heard the clank of a chain, and, looking down, he saw a large brown beast about the size of a small calf, with enormous red eyes, which it kept fixed on him, walking by his side. He hurried on, and tried by walking in the middle of the lane not to give it room to pass (the lane is barely three feet wide), but it was always there, on the footpath, keeping step with him. When he turned into the broader lane, where its own special “corner” is, it turned away, and he hurried on to the Villette. Determined not to give in to his cowardice, he came home the same way, and there where it had left him was the beast waiting for him. It walked with him, on his other hand this time, still keeping to the footpath, till he got into the Icart-road, where it disappeared. These stories were told me in 1896 by Mrs. Le Patourel, of St. Martin’s, who was a Miss Mauger, of Saints’, and she was told them by a relative of hers who was a daughter of the Mr. Mauger to whom these incidents happened. She declared that they were absolutely true. Our coachman, whose father lived in the neighbourhood at “Les Pages,” just above Petit Bôt, told me that his father would never let him go along that lane after dark, and would never go himself, for fear of “La Biche,” and many other inhabitants of St. Martin’s tell the same story. Another old man, belonging to one of the most respectable families in the parish, and who had himself been churchwarden for eleven years, told me that in his youth he lived in the neighbourhood of the Villette, and one evening his sister, then a strong young girl of sixteen, rushed in saying she had seen “La Biche.” The shock was so great that she took to her bed and died shortly afterwards. [135] These torches of “glui” were called “des Brandons.” CHAPTER VIII. The Devil. “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.” --_Shakespeare._ “Tis a history Handed from ages down; a nurse’s tale, Which children open-eyed and mouth’d devour, And thus, as garrulous ignorance relates, We learn it, and believe.”