One day de Leuven and I were shooting over the marshes of Pondron. It was a place where two harvests were gathered during the year. The first harvest was that of a small thicket of alderwood. The owner of the land, after having cut his branches, stripped the twigs off, sawed it and tied it in bundles. Then he became busy over his second harvest, which was that of hay. They were just reaping this crop. But, as it was luncheon-time, the reapers had rested their scythes, here and there, and were feeding by a small river wherein they could moisten their hard bread. One of them had placed his scythe against one of the heaps of cut wood, about two feet and a half high, placed in cubic metres or half-mètres. I put up a snipe; I fired and killed it, and it fell behind this pile of wood against which the scythe was propped. It was the first thing I had killed that day, consequently it happened to be the perquisite Pyramus was in the habit of appropriating. So, putting two and two together, he had scarcely seen the snipe, stopped in its flight, fall vertically behind the wood pile, before he darted over the stack so as to fall on the spot as soon as it did, without loss of time. As I knew beforehand that it was a head of game lost, I did not hurry myself to see the tail feathers of my snipe in the depths of Pyramus's throat, but, to my great surprise, I saw no more of Pyramus than if he had tumbled down an invisible chasm, hewn out behind the pile of wood. When I had re-loaded my gun, I decided to fathom this mystery. Pyramus had fallen on the far side of the heap of wood, his neck on the point of the scythe; this point had penetrated to the right of the pharynx, behind the neck, and stuck out four inches in front. Poor Pyramus could not stir, and was bleeding' to death: the snipe, intact, was within six inches of his nose. Adolphe and I raised him up, so as to cause him the least possible hurt; we carried him to the river, and we bathed him in deep water; then I made him a compress with my handkerchief, folded in sixteen, which we bound round his neck with Adolphe's silk one. Then, seeing a peasant from Haramont passing, with a donkey carrying two baskets, we put Pyramus in one of the paniers and we had him carried to Haramont, whence next day I took him away in a small conveyance. Pyramus was a week between life and death. For a month he carried his head on one side, like Prince Tuffiakin. Finally, at the end of six weeks, he had regained his elasticity of movement, and appeared to have completely forgotten the terrible catastrophe. But whenever he saw a scythe, he made an immense detour to avoid coming in contact with it. Another day, he returned home, his body as full of holes as a sieve. He had been wandering about the forest alone, watching his opportunity, and he had leapt at the throat of a hare; the hare screamed out: a keeper, who was about a couple of hundred steps away, ran up; but before the keeper could clear the two hundred paces,