ve hints of surrendering.

"Confound that foolish Mercury!" he cried. "At this moment I ought to
have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her
praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of
smoking hot coffee, while I am winding up my chapter upon the ancient
armoury at Nideck. Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes,
stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke
my neck! There!--I said so! Was that a tree I knocked against? A hundred
thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect,
who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up!
I'll lay any wager that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced
and corroded bit of stone, without either nose or legs--some shapeless
deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal. Oh, you
architects! you architects!--you are always finding antiquities
everywhere. Luckily I had not my spectacles on, or I should have smashed
them against that tree; but now I shall be obliged to find a bed
somewhere among the bushes. What a road this is!--nothing but ruts, and
holes, and pits, and loose rocks and boulders!"

In one of those moments when the good man, getting exhausted, was
stopping for breath, he thought he could hear the grating of a saw far
down the valley. What was his joy when he became certain that it was
that!

"Heaven be praised!" he cried, plucking up his spirits; "now to push on
with halting steps. Now I shall get a little rest. What a lesson this
will be for me! Providence had compassion upon my rheumatism. What an
old fool to go and expose myself to have to lie out in the woods at my
time of life, to ruin my health and undermine my constitution! I shall
remember this! Never shall I forget this warning!"

In a quarter of an hour the noise of falling water became more distinct;
then a faint light broke through the trees. Maitre Bernard then found
himself at the top of the wood; he observed below the heath a stream
running down the winding valley as far as he could see, and just before
him the saw-mill, with its long dark posts and beams crossing and
recrossing in the gloom like a huge spider.

He crossed the high-arched bridge over the rushing dam, and looked
through the little window into the woodman's hut.

It was a low, dark shed leaning against a hollow in the rock. At the
farther end of the natural cavity was a small pile of