the cottage and its
human occupants who were desperately shouting and trying to burst open
the door, in their ignorance of what had happened.

At the extreme edge of the slope, the comte let go of the hut, and it at
once begun to run down towards the valley. At first it moved but slowly,
but, its speed increasing as it went, it moved quicker and quicker,
until soon it was rushing down the hill at a tremendous rate. Its shafts
bumped along the ground and it leaped over and dashed against the
obstacles in its path, as if it had been endowed with life; it bounded
over the head of an old beggar who was crouching in a ditch, and, as it
passed, the man heard frightful cries issuing from within it. All at
once one of the wheels was torn off, and the hut turned over on its
side. That however, did not stop it, and now it rolled over and over
like a ball, or like some house uprooted from its foundations and hurled
from the summit of a mountain. It rolled on and on until it reached the
edge of the last ravine; there it took a final leap, and after
describing a curve, fell to the earth, and smashed like an egg-shell.

Directly it had dashed upon the rocks at the bottom of the valley, the
old beggar, who had seen it falling, began to make his way down through
the brambles. He did not go straight to the shattered hut, but, like the
cautious rustic that he was, went to announce the accident at the
nearest farm-house. The farm people ran to the spot the beggar pointed
out, and beneath the fragments of the hut, found two bruised and mangled
corpses. The man's forehead was split open, and his face crushed; the
woman's jaw was almost separated from her head, and their broken limbs
were as soft as if there had not been a bone beneath the flesh. Still
the farmers could recognize them, and they began to make all sorts of
conjectures as to the cause of the accident.

"What could they have been doin' in the cabin?" said a woman.

The old beggar replied that apparently they had taken refuge from the
weather, and that the high wind had overturned the hut, and blown it
down the precipice. He added that he himself was going to take shelter
in it when he saw the horses fastened to the shafts and concluded that
the place was already occupied.

"If it hadn't been for that I should have been where they are now," he
said with an air of self-congratulation.

"Perhaps it would have been all the better if you had been," said some
one.

"Why would