w a fugitive on the face of the earth, whereupon he fell to weeping
bitterly and dried his tears with the mastiff's bushy tail.

The poor dog was so utterly taken aback that it could not recover from
its astonishment. Once or twice it showed its white teeth and growled at
the stranger, but it did not venture to hurt him. No doubt it thought
that this strange animal might perhaps be able to bite better than
itself.

Thus the two quadrupeds strolled comfortably together right into the
courtyard. The dog stopped before his three-cornered kennel which Mr.
Korde interpreted as an invitation on the part of his respectful host
for him to go in first, and, accepting the offer in the spirit of true
courtesy, and with the deepest emotion, he squeezed himself into the
narrow dog-kennel, while the dispossessed bow-wow squatted down at the
entrance of his house with the utmost astonishment, unable
satisfactorily to explain to himself by what right this strange wild
beast usurped his ancestral holding.

Mr. Korde, however, soon began to snore inside there so terrifically
that the scared dog ran out into the middle of the courtyard and fell
a-barking with all his might and main, as if he had been offered pitch
for supper instead of meat.

As to what followed, it is extremely doubtful whether Mr. Korde saw it
all with his own eyes, or whether it was the dream of a drunken brain
impressed so vividly on his memory by his imagination that subsequently
he fancied it to be true.

* * * * *

The moon had gone down and there was a great commotion in the courtyard
surrounding the forester's hut.

A lamp had been lit in the shelter of a shed, and a group of men was
standing round it--pale, sinister figures, putting their heads closely
together and listening attentively to a lean, lanky man in a cassock,
who was reading a letter to them.

The reader was short-sighted, and as he spelt out the letter he put his
face so near it as to quite cover his features.

"What the deuce is all this about?" thought Mr. Korde to himself as he
peeped through the crevices of the dog's dwelling-place, "what is my
colleague, the myoptic schoolmaster doing here, and why is he burying
his nose in that bit of paper?"

"I hasten to inform you," so read the man in the cassock, "that
the hostile armies are already on the confines of the kingdom.
What the object of the enemy is you know right well. He is coming