My puppets did indeed make an impression on me by reason of the rôle I assigned them. As I always reserved for myself that of protagonist, hero, conqueror, I easily surmounted that terror during the day, but at night, though the hero became little Nicolas Vermont, an urchin, the barrel remained a dragon. Cowering under the sheets, my mind excited by the story which my aunt had just finished, I _knew_ the garden was peopled with my terrifying fancies, and that Briareus was mounting guard there all the time, and that the dreadful barrel, resuscitated, hiding its claws with its wings, watched my window from afar. At that age I despaired of ever being, later on in life, like other people, and able to face the dark. And yet my fears did vanish, leaving me impressionable no doubt, but not a coward; and it was indeed I who found myself without dismay lost in the lonely wood--all too empty, alas, of fairies and enchanters. I had just reached this point in my _reverie_, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all--and then the sleeping calm returned. Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the _château_; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them. And indeed a light sound of steps like the trot of some four-footed animal, made itself heard and drew nearer on the roadway. I listened for some time to the beast moving to and fro in the labyrinth, losing itself like me perhaps, and then suddenly it appeared before me. One could not mistake its spreading antlers, the height of its neck and the delicacy of its ears; it was a stag of ten. But hardly had I perceived it than it made off in a sudden _volte-face_. Then--had it gathered itself in to spring?--its body seemed to me strangely low and paltry, and was it a mere reflection?--seemed to me to be of a white color. The animal disappeared in a twinkling, and its little galloping steps died quickly away. Had I at the first glance taken a goat for a stag? Or had I at the second glance taken a stag for a goat? To tell the truth, I was much interested and puzzled; so much so that I asked myself whether I were not going to resume the soul of the child I had been at Fonval. But a little reflection made me realize that hunger, fatigue and sleepiness, helped out by moonshine, may easily cause one’s eyes to be deceived, and that a ray falling on an object and transforming it is no unwonted phenomenon. I rather regretted it; for, having lost my terror of the mysterious, I had still kept my love for it. I am one of those who are sorry that “Philosophy has clipped an angel’s wings,” and yet I cannot let a mystery remain a mystery for me. Now this beast was really a very extraordinary beast.