What passed after this no one can tell--no eye saw but His above: but on the following morning when the Père Séguin, for he was the unfortunate person who set the _Traquenard_, came to examine it, he found the trap at the foot of the oak deluged with blood, the bone of a human leg upright between the iron teeth, and all around, scattered about the turf and the path, a quantity of human remains: bits of hair, bones,--red and moist, as if the flesh had been but recently torn from them,--shreds of a coat, and other articles of clothing were also discovered near the spot; with the assistance of some dogs that were put on the scent, three wolves, their heads and bodies cut open with a hatchet, were found dying in the adjacent thickets. The bones of their victim were carried to the nearest church; and on the following day these mournful fragments, which had only a few hours before been full of life and youth and health, were committed to the earth. When the venerated _curé_ of the village, after previously endeavouring in every possible way by Christian exhortation to prepare his aged mother to hear the sad tale, informed her that these remnants of humanity was all that was left of her boy, she laughed--alas! it was the laugh of madness--reason had fled! Many a time have I met the aged creature strolling in a glade of the forest, or seated basking in the sun outside the door of her cottage. Her complexion was of the yellow paleness of some old parchment, she was always laughing and singing--always rocking in her arms a log of wood, a hank of hemp, or bundle of fern--objects which to her poor crazy eyes represented her child;--her child as it was in its tender years: she called it by his name, she kissed, embraced and dandled it, rocked it on her knees; and when she thought it should be tired, sang those lullabies which had soothed the slumbers of him who was now no more. I have witnessed the horrors of war, I have heard many a tragic story, but never has my heart been more touched with feelings of profound grief than the day on which I first met this poor creature--this widowed mother, then seventy years of age--singing and walking in the forest, carrying and dandling in her shrivelled arms a shawl rolled up; kissing and talking to the silent bundle, smiling on it,--sitting at the foot of a tree, and opening that bosom in which the springs of life had for years been dried, to nurse and nourish once more what seemed to her still her baby boy.