scented prey, a large wolf leaped up into the narrow aperture paused a second and then quickly thrusting his balanced body forward, dropped noiselessly down on the ground floor within. Another, and another, and another, followed in rapid succession, till more than half a score of the gaunt, grim monsters had landed inside, and silently arranged themselves in a row before the bed of their intended victims, who still strangely slept on. One more fearful pause succeeded, in which the greedy band seemed to be eagerly eyeing the fated sleepers, and marking out portions of their bodies for the deadly gripe; when suddenly springing forward, they all fiercely pounced upon the victims, and, with the seeming noise of a thousand wrangling fiends, mingled with the sharp, short, half-stifled screeches of human agony, that were heard in the hideous din, seized, throttled, and tore them, limb from limb, to pieces, and bore off the dissevered parts, munching and snarling, to different corners of the room. The noise now for a short time subsided, and nothing was heard but the low, broken growls of the cannibal troop, as they busily craunched the bones, and tore the flesh on which they were raking their horrid feast. Then followed the fierce and noisy encounters for the decreasing fragments, till none were left worth contending for. At this juncture, two of the half-glutted but still ravenous gang, relinquishing the well-picked bones on which they had been laboring, rose, and, advancing into the middle of the room, stood a moment listlessly viewing the operations of the rest; when they suddenly started, and, turning slowly round and round, began busily to snuff the air, and throw their noses upward in search of some fresh game that appeared now to have struck their keen olfactories. The affrighted maiden, who had been witnessing this hideous scene from her hitherto unsuspected concealment above, with blood curdling in horror at the sights and sounds that reached her recoiling senses, now shuddered in fresh alarm; for she but too well understood what this new and fearfully-significant movement of the wolves portended. And, instinctively withdrawing her face from her loop-hole of observation, she hastily drew herself up in the middle of her frail support, so as to be as far as possible out of the reach of her expected assailants. But they at once detected the slight sounds occasioned by her movement, and, now guided by two senses instead of one, instantly began to gnash their teeth, and, with wild howls, to leap upward after their newly-discovered prey. And although her position was more than seven feet from the ground,--a height which, it might be supposed, could not have been reached by this class of animals in a perpendicular leap,--yet so desperate had the present gang become by the taste of human blood, that they soon, in their determined and constantly-repeated efforts, began to strike and seize the beams with their teeth, by which they would hang