smiling look the flying Amazon. At the extremity of the avenue in which I
had just failed to make her conquest, she turned abruptly to the left, to
go and take a parallel road. I only had to cross the adjoining thicket to
see her overtake a cavalcade composed of ten or twelve persons, who seemed
to be waiting for her, and to whom she shouted from a distance, in a
broken voice:

"Gentlemen! gentlemen! a wild man! there is a wild man in the forest!"

My interest being highly excited by this beginning, I settle myself
comfortably behind a thick bush, with eye and ear equally attentive. They
crowd around the lady; it is supposed at first that she is jesting, but
her emotion is too serious to have been causeless. She saw, distinctly
saw, not exactly a savage, perhaps, but a man in rags, whose tattered
blouse seemed covered with blood, whose face, hands, and whole person were
repulsively filthy, whose beard was frightful, and whose eyes half
protruded from their sockets; in short, an individual, by the side of whom
the most atrocious of Salvator Rosa's brigands would be as one of
Watteau's shepherds. Never did a man's vanity enjoy such a treat! This
charming person added that I had threatened her, and that I had jumped at
her horse's bridle like the specter of the forest of Mans.[A]

The response to this marvelous story is a general and enthusiastic shout:

"Let us chase him! let us surround him! let us track him! hip, hip,
hurrah!"--whereupon the whole cavalry force starts off at a gallop in the
direction given by the amiable story teller.

I had, to all appearances, but to remain quietly ensconced in my
hiding-place in order to completely foil the hunters who were going in