The region being high and hilly, and the season midwinter, the atmosphere was intensely cold, yet I was dubious of the strength of the ice, and feared that my horse, with its wounded off hind leg, might flounder and fall if its hoofs pierced the covering of the stream. As this idea occurred to me I was about to dismount, and hold the animal by the bridle, when the appearance of a well-bearded human visage regarding me steadily from a cleft in the rocks, made me pause with a hand on my holster-flap, a motion which made the person instantly vanish. The mist enveloping the willow-covered bank I had to traverse before reaching the stream was dense, and curling up in the sunshine, and it seemed to me that certain objects which at first resembled stumps of trees suddenly took the form of men, clad in white coats, the uniform of the French line; and, as the event proved, here were six men of the Regiment de Bretagne, a foraging party suborned by Bourgneuf to cut me off, and with them was the identical peasant whom Monjoy and I had met near the ruins of the old schloss--Karl Karsseboom. I had the marshal's signed passport, but feared to ride forward or deliver it, and for a time remained unchallenged and irresolutely watching those men whose white-clad figures amid the frosty mist and tossing willows seemed indistinct and wavering, like Banquo's shadowy line of kings, or the weird sisters in "Macbeth." I waved aloft the paper given me by Bourgneuf, the immediate reply to which was the levelling of four muskets; but three flashed in the pan, the priming having probably become wet over night. The bullet from the fourth, however, knocked my grenadier cap awry. I then shook a white handkerchief, and demanded a parley; but a fifth and sixth musket flashed redly out of the white mist, making a hundred reverberations amid the river's bed, and another bullet grazed my left ear like a hot searing-iron. I was full of fury now, and while these would-be assassins were casting about and reloading, I heard a voice shout clearly in French, and with a mocking laugh-- "_Peste_! Arnaud de Pricorbin--_il ne sait pas distinguer une femme d'une girouette!_" (He knows not a woman from a weathercock--meaning that he was a bad shot, and could hit neither.) The brother of the executed Volontaire de Clermont was here, and had preceded me to the ford; thus I was in peculiarly bad hands it would appear. Their six muskets were unserviceable as yet, so, spurring furiously, I rushed sword in hand at the whole group, firing a pistol and hurling it after the shot as I advanced.