! help!"

But his whistling, his cries, proceed from five large and gaping
wounds,--

"Each one a death in nature,"--

which move like so many complaining lips. The five calls, the five
whistlings, all made and heard at once, come from the dead man by the
mouths of his gushing wounds; and fearful are they to hear!

At this instant the Chouette waves her wings, and mocks the deathly
groans of the victim with five bursts of laughter,--a laughter as
unearthly and as horrible as the madman's mirth; and then again she
shrieks:

"The cattle-dealer of Poissy. Murder! murder! murder!"

Protracted and underground echoes first repeat aloud the malevolent
laughter of the screech-owl. Then they seem to die away in the very
bowels of the earth.

At this sound two large dogs, as black as midnight, with eyes glaring
like burning coals, begin to run rapidly around--around--around the
Schoolmaster, baying furiously. They almost touch him, and yet their
bark appears as distant as if carried on the wind of the morning.

Gradually these spectres fade away as the previous one did, and are lost
in the pale vapour which is continually ascending.

A new exhalation now arises from the lake of blood, and spreads itself
on its surface. It is a sort of greenish, transparent mist; it resembles
the vertical section of a canal filled with water. At first he sees the
bed of the canal covered in by a thick vase formed of numberless
reptiles usually imperceptible to the unassisted eye, but which,
enlarged, as if viewed through a microscope, assume monstrous forms,
vast proportions relatively to their actual size. It is no longer mud,
but a compact, living, crawling mass,--an inextricable conglomeration
which wriggles and curls; so close, so dense, that a sullen and low
undulation hardly stirs the level of this vase, or rather bed of foulest
animalculae. Above trickles gently--gently, a turbid stream, thick and
stagnating, which, in its dilatory flow, disturbs the filth incessantly
vomited by the sewers of a great city,--fragments of all sorts,
carcasses of animals, etc., etc. Suddenly the Schoolmaster hears the
plash of a body, which falls heavily on the water; in its recoil the
water sprinkles his very face. In the midst of the air-bubbles which
rise thick and fast to the surface of the canal he sees the body of a
woman, which sinks rapidly as she struggles--struggles.

Then he sees himself and the Chouette running hastily along the b