hance, began, with a secret intention not difficult to
conceive, to search for some remains of the former monastery. The
keeper, Michu, to whom the forest was well known, helped his master
in the search, and it was his sagacity as a forester which led to the
discovery of the site. Observing the trend of the five chief roads of
the forest, some of which were now effaced, he saw that they all ended
either at the little eminence or by the pond at the foot of it, to which
points travellers from Troyes, from the valley of Arcis and that of
Cinq-Cygne, and from Bar-sur-Aube doubtless came. The marquis wished
to excavate the hillock but he dared not employ the people of the
neighborhood. Pressed by circumstances, he abandoned the intention,
leaving in Michu's mind a strong conviction that the eminence had either
the treasure or the foundations of the former abbey. He continued,
all alone, this archaeological enterprise; he sounded the earth and
discovered a hollowness on the level of the pond between two trees, at
the foot of the only craggy part of the hillock.

One fine night he came to the place armed with a pickaxe, and by the
sweat of his brow uncovered a succession of cellars, which were entered
by a flight of stone steps. The pond, which was three feet deep in the
middle, formed a sort of dipper, the handle of which seemed to come from
the little eminence, and went far to prove that a spring had once issued
from the crags, and was now lost by infiltration through the forest. The
marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow,
and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former
roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a
spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved
plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost
indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close
herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any animal,
unless a wild one, to come there. Convinced that no game was in the
marsh and repelled by the craggy sides of the hills, keepers and hunters
had never explored or visited this nook, which belonged to a part of the
forest where the timber had not been cut for many years and which Michu
meant to keep in its full growth when the time came round to fell it.

At the further end of the first cellar was a vaulted chamber, clean
and dry, built with hewn stone, a sort of convent du