read to the size of a half-franc
piece,--then covered a place as large as the palm of your hand. It
gained upon him fast. The poor man groaned aloud in agony; faster and
faster sped the horse over the frozen ground,--farther and farther
spread the pain over his side. To complete the dismal picture the storm
commenced,--snow mingled with rain. But snow, and rain, and cold were
naught to him; for, though his arms and legs were frozen to icicles, he
felt it not; the fatal symptom was upon him; he was doomed to die,--not
of cold, but of scarlet fever!

At length, he knew not how, more dead than alive, he reached the gate of
the city. A band of ill-bred dogs, that were serenading at a corner of
the street, seeing the notary dash by, joined in the hue and cry, and
ran barking and yelping at his heels. It was now late at night, and only
here and there a solitary lamp twinkled from an upper story. But on went
the notary, down this street and up that, till at last he reached his
own door. There was a light in his wife's bedroom. The good woman came
to the window, alarmed at such a knocking, and howling, and clattering
at her door so late at night; and the notary was too deeply absorbed in
his own sorrows to observe that the lamp cast the shadow of two heads on
the window-curtain.

"Let me in! let me in! Quick! quick!" he exclaimed, almost breathless
from terror and fatigue.

"Who are you, that come to disturb a lone woman at this hour of the
night?" cried a sharp voice from above. "Begone about your business, and
let quiet people sleep."

"Come down and let me in! I am your husband! Don't you know my voice?
Quick, I beseech you; for I am dying here in the street!"

After a few moments of delay and a few more words of parley, the door
was opened, and the notary stalked into his domicile, pale and haggard
in aspect, and as stiff and straight as a ghost. Cased from head to heel
in an armor of ice, as the glare of the lamp fell upon him, he looked
like a knight-errant mailed in steel. But in one place his armor was
broken. On his right side was a circular spot, as large as the crown of
your hat, and about as black!

"My dear wife!" he exclaimed with more tenderness than he had exhibited
for many years, "Reach me a chair. My hours are numbered. I am a dead
man!"

Alarmed at these exclamations, his wife stripped off his overcoat.
Something fell from beneath it, and was dashed to pieces on the hearth.
It was the notary's pipe!