At last, in pursuing the fox, he entered a wild and rocky dell, where perpendicular cliffs, fringed by cedars and hemlocks, frowned over the glen. Plunging into the place, which seemed like a vast cavern, he soon came near the object of his pursuit, and brought him to the ground. Before he had time to pick up his game, he saw a couple of sables peering through a crevice in a decayed oak that had rooted itself in the rocks above. Loading his gun, he fired, and the animals immediately disappeared within the cavity. Believing that they were killed, he clambered up the steep face of the precipice with great labor and no little danger. At length, he reached the foot of the tree which leaned from the cliff, over the dark valley beneath. Immediately he began to ascend it, hardly observing, in his eagerness, that it was rotten to the very root, and trembled throughout its whole extent, as he ascended. Up he went, heedless of all but the game, until he reached the crevice, where two sables, of the largest kind, lay dead. He took them out, and, for the first time, looked beneath. He was touched with a momentary thrill of fear as he gazed down and perceived the gulf that yawned beneath him. At the same moment, he heard a crackling at the roots of the tree, and perceived a descending motion in the limbs to which he clung. He now knew that he was falling, and that, with the vast mass, he must descend into the valley beneath. The moment was almost too awful for thought: yet his mind turned to his father and sister, with a feeling of farewell, and a prayer to Heaven for his soul. How swift is the wing of thought in the moment of peril! He felt himself rushing downward through the air; he closed his eyes; there was a horrid crash in his ears, and he knew no more. The sound of the falling oak rung through the glen, and in the space of a few minutes the figure of a man, clothed in furs, was seen emerging from one of the caverns, at a little distance. He approached the spot where Alexis had fallen; but at first nothing was to be seen save the trunk of the tree, now completely imbedded in the snow. The man was about to turn away, when he saw the fox lying at a little distance, and then remarked one of the sables, also buried in the snow. Perceiving that the animal was warm, as if just killed, he looked around for the hunter. Not seeing him, the truth seemed at once to flash upon his mind; and he began to dig in the snow beneath the trunk of the tree. Throwing off his bear-skin coat and a huge wolf-skin cap, and seizing upon a broken limb of the tree, he labored with prodigious strength and zeal. A large excavation was soon made, and pretty soon he found the cap of Alexis. This increased his zeal, and he continued to dig with unabated ardor for more than an hour. Buried at the depth of eight feet in the snow, he found the young man, and with great labor took him out from the place in which he was imbedded, and which, but for this timely aid, had been his grave.