breaking my house down, and on the side of the ravine, too."

All cautiously approached, tore away the planks that remained, and
leaned over the abyss. They contemplated a strange spectacle. The storm
raged in all its fury; and it was a storm of the Pyrenees. Enormous
flashes of lightning came all at once from all parts of the horizon,
and their fires succeeded so quickly that there seemed no interval; they
appeared to be a continuous flash. It was but rarely the flaming vault
would suddenly become obscure; and it then instantly resumed its
glare. It was not the light that seemed strange on this night, but the
darkness.

The tall thin peaks and whitened rocks stood out from the red background
like blocks of marble on a cupola of burning brass, and resembled, amid
the snows, the wonders of a volcano; the waters gushed from them like
flames; the snow poured down like dazzling lava.

In this moving mass a man was seen struggling, whose efforts only
involved him deeper and deeper in the whirling and liquid gulf; his
knees were already buried. In vain he clasped his arms round an enormous
pyramidal and transparent icicle, which reflected the lightning like a
rock of crystal; the icicle itself was melting at its base, and slowly
bending over the declivity of the rock. Under the covering of snow,
masses of granite were heard striking against each other, as they
descended into the vast depths below. Yet they could still save him; a
space of scarcely four feet separated him from Laubardemont.

"I sink!" he cried; "hold out to me something, and thou shalt have the
treaty."

"Give it me, and I will reach thee this musket," said the judge.

"There it is," replied the ruffian, "since the Devil is for Richelieu!"
and taking one hand from the hold of his slippery support, he threw a
roll of wood into the cabin. Laubardemont rushed back upon the treaty
like a wolf on his prey. Jacques in vain held out his arm; he slowly
glided away with the enormous thawing block turned upon him, and was
silently buried in the snow.

"Ah, villain," were his last words, "thou hast deceived me! but thou
didst not take the treaty from me. I gave it thee, Father!" and he
disappeared wholly under the thick white bed of snow. Nothing was seen
in his place but the glittering flakes which the lightning had ploughed
up, as it became extinguished in them; nothing was--heard but the
rolling of the thunder and the dash of the water against the rocks, for