erie he was awakened by the voices of the guides,
repeating his name, which was reverbed from cliff to cliff, till an
hundred tongues seemed to call him; when he soon quieted the fears of
the Count and the Lady Blanche, by returning to the cave. As the storm,
however, seemed approaching, they did not quit their place of shelter;
and the Count, seated between his daughter and St. Foix, endeavoured to
divert the fears of the former, and conversed on subjects, relating to
the natural history of the scene, among which they wandered. He spoke
of the mineral and fossile substances, found in the depths of these
mountains,--the veins of marble and granite, with which they abounded,
the strata of shells, discovered near their summits, many thousand
fathom above the level of the sea, and at a vast distance from its
present shore;--of the tremendous chasms and caverns of the rocks, the
grotesque form of the mountains, and the various phaenomena, that seem
to stamp upon the world the history of the deluge. From the natural
history he descended to the mention of events and circumstances,
connected with the civil story of the Pyrenees; named some of the most
remarkable fortresses, which France and Spain had erected in the passes
of these mountains; and gave a brief account of some celebrated sieges
and encounters in early times, when Ambition first frightened Solitude
from these her deep recesses, made her mountains, which before had
echoed only to the torrent's roar, tremble with the clang of arms, and,
when man's first footsteps in her sacred haunts had left the print of
blood!

As Blanche sat, attentive to the narrative, that rendered the
scenes doubly interesting, and resigned to solemn emotion, while she
considered, that she was on the very ground, once polluted by these
events, her reverie was suddenly interrupted by a sound, that came
in the wind.--It was the distant bark of a watch-dog. The travellers
listened with eager hope, and, as the wind blew stronger, fancied, that
the sound came from no great distance; and, the guides having little
doubt, that it proceeded from the inn they were in search of, the Count
determined to pursue his way. The moon now afforded a stronger, though
still an uncertain light, as she moved among broken clouds; and the
travellers, led by the sound, recommenced their journey along the brow
of the precipice, preceded by a single torch, that now contended with
the moon-light; for the guides, believing