Hungry and alarmed, and now quite worn out with his lengthened walk, the young Parisian lay stretched on the moss, listening with painful anxiety to this melancholy conversation of the woods, when, suddenly, and as night fell, spreading over the earth her sable wings and shaking from the folds of her robe the luminous legions of stars, he heard a prolonged and sonorous howl in the distance--a strolling wolf-- "Cruel as Death! and hungry as the grave! Burning for blood! bony and gaunt and grim," had scented the Parisian and was inviting his good friends with the long teeth, to come and sup on the dainty morsel. Touched as if by a hot iron, up got the terrified youth, and striking his ten nails into the friendly tree near him like an Indian monkey, he was in an instant many feet above its base. Here, astride upon a branch, shivering and shaking, each hair on end, and murmuring many a Pater and Ave Maria, unsaid for years, he passed the most horrific night that any citizen of the department of the Seine had ever been known to spend in the middle of the forest of Erveau. The following morning, but not until the sun had already run nearly half his course, for he never dared to leave his timber observatory before, _le pauvre diable_ dropped down from his perch like an acorn--and, marching off with weary steps, and scarcely a hope that ere another night fell he should gain the shelter of some cottage, he dragged himself along. On he rolled from side to side, torn with the thorns and bitten by the gnats that swarmed around him, sometimes calling upon his mother, sometimes upon the saints--when a wood-cutter happily met, and seeing his exhausted condition, threw the slim student over his shoulders like a bundle of straw, and carried him to a neighbouring village. There, he was put to bed and attended with every care, when he soon recovered--and received the charming intelligence that he was about forty miles from his uncle's house--that he had been wandering for that distance in the most beautiful part of the forest of Erveau, and that if by any chance he had deviated a little more to the right in his unpleasant steeple-chase across the woods, he would have gone, in a straight line, eighty-six miles without meeting house or cottage or human soul until he found himself at the gates of Dijon, chief town of the Côte-d'Or, where he might and would, no doubt, have been able to refresh himself with a bottle of Beaune and inspect the Gothic tombs of the great Dukes of Burgundy.