led quietly enough to
a stake firmly driven in the ground, to which he was chained, all the
time slowly surveying the excited crowd with a melancholy eye.

"Poor old traveller!" I cried to myself, "would anybody have told you ten
years ago, when grave, terrible, and solitary you were traversing from
side to side the high glaciers in Switzerland, in the gloomy glens of the
Unterwald, and your deep growls made the old oaks tremble in every
leaf--who could have told you that the day would come when, sad and
resigned, with an iron collar round your throat, you would be tied to a
post and devoured by dogs to amuse a mob at Bergzabern? Alas! _Sic
transit gloria mundi_!"

As these meditations were occupying my thoughts, noticing that everybody
was bending forward to see, I did like the rest, and I soon saw the
possibility of warm work.

A pair of boar-hounds, belonging to old Heinrich, were being led to
the other end of the court. Struggling in the chain, these ferocious
creatures were foaming with rage. One was of the large Danish breed,
white, with large black spots, supple of limb, with muscles like steel
springs, jaws opening wide like an alligator's; the other a huge hound
from the Tannewald, never disabled in one leg according to law, ribs
barely covered, the backbone hard and knotted like a bamboo cane. They
did not bark, but they were straining against the chain with all their
might, and there stood old Heinrich with his grey broad head flung back,
his ruddy moustache bristling, his thin razorbacked nose hooked over his
lips, and his long leather-gaitered legs firmly planted against the
stones in his strenuous efforts to restrain with both hands the eager
appetite of his dogs for the fight, while he opposed to their attempts to
bound forward the whole weight of his body.

"Back! back!" he shouted to the bear-leader, and the ruffian ran back to
the shelter of a faggot-stack.

Then every face bending over the galleries grew red and hot with the
excitement of the horrid fray, and starting eyes glanced from every nook
and corner.

The bear sat on his haunches gathered together ready for action, his huge
paws uplifted. I could see how he quivered in his rough skin, and his
muzzle seemed to annoy him terribly. All at once the chain was slipped;
at a single leap the hounds cleared the intervening space, and their
sharp fangs were in a moment fixed in both poor Baptiste's ears, whose
heavy paws and long sharp claws hug