a flagon of brandy
and water and a thick stick, I said good-bye to Chateauborne.

"A couple of hundred yards saw me beyond the outskirts of the town,
wherein I was the sole pedestrian, and silence reigned supreme. On and
on I plodded, the feeble, yellow light of my lantern just preventing
me--but only just--from wandering from the track. The road, which for
the first mile or so was tolerably level, gradually began to rise, and,
as it did so, I noticed for the first time indistinct images of
gigantic, naked trees that becoming more and more numerous, and closer
and closer together, at length united their long and grotesquely shaped
branches overhead, and I found myself in the depths of a vast forest.
The snow, which had up to the present held off, now recommenced to fall,
and presently the wind, which had for some time been slowly acquiring
strength, came howling through the trees with the utmost fury, the first
blast swishing the lantern out of my hands and hurling me with
considerable force into an undergrowth of thorns and brambles, out of
which I extricated myself with no little difficulty.

"I was now in the sorriest of plights--enveloped on all sides in Stygian
darkness I was unable to discover my lantern, and was thus totally at
the mercy of the ruthless elements. There were only two courses before
me--either I must remain where I was and be frozen to death, or, making
a guess at the route, I must push on ahead and run the risk of ending my
life at the bottom of a ravine. I chose the latter. Groping about with
my feet, until I at length discovered what I thought must be the right
track, I pushed ahead, and, staggering and stumbling forward, managed to
make some sort of progress, terribly slow though it was. The blinding
darkness of the snowy night, the intense silence and utter solitude of
the place, combined with the knowledge that on all sides of me lay holes
and chasms, dampened my spirits and raised strange phantoms in my
imagination. The wind now rose, and the dismal sighing of the trees
speedily grew into a series of the most perturbing screeches, as the
branches and trunks swayed to and fro like reeds before the violence of
the hurricane.

"At this juncture I gave myself up for lost, and, coming to a standstill
up to my knees in snow, was preparing to lie down and die, when, to my
great joy, a light suddenly appeared ahead of me, and the next moment a
man, mounted on a big white horse, rode noiselessly u