astounded, and (as did Mademoiselle and the sons) used every sort of argument to turn us from it; amongst others, he assured us that _l’année passée_ the Prussians had attempted to drain the moat merely to kill all the fish--“les sacré vilains hommes!” but the stench arising from it when low, quickly obliged them to desist. It would not do--we were peremptory; and at length the old man opened the voider, closed the feeder, and to our delight the work of destruction began. Day after day the water gradually receded from the foot of the old walls and from the opposite bank--already in many places the oozy slime of the bottom began to appear--already we rejoiced at the innumerable corpses of our enemies lying on it everywhere; the upper part of the moat was already, not dry, but waterless; and we were on the point of seeing the giant leviathan, when lo! the weather, hitherto cool and showery, became superb, and the heat almost insufferable. Decomposition, animal and vegetable, commenced with alarming rapidity, and the mephitic vapours thus produced pervading every creek and corner of the chateau, obliged us, _bongré malgré_, to reclose the voider and reopen the feeder,--and thus terminated _la guerre aux grenouilles_. But, alas! our punishment for having resisted the entreaties and warnings of the old gardener was not to close with the sluices. The same hot sun had dried up nearly all the sources whence the moat had been fed, and many a long day of disgust and repentance had we to endure ere the waters again covered the odious slime sufficiently to relieve us from its nauseous stink, and to enable the frogs to renew their song, which, when they did, was to us a song of joy; and we had the further mortification of finding that, with a little patience, we might have saved ourselves all the trouble and suffering, for we had become so accustomed to it that it fell on our ear innocuous.