"MON DIEU!" he cried--while the girl moaned in terror, the
Breton crossed himself, and La Trape looked uncomfortable--"the
place is bewitched!"

"Nonsense!" I said. "Who is in the house, girl?"

"Only my mother," she wailed. "Oh, my poor mother!"

I silenced her, scolding them all for fools, and her first; and
La Font, recovering himself, did the same. But this was the year
of that strange appearance of the spectre horseman at
Fontainebleau of which so much has been said; and my servants,
when we had approached the house a little nearer, and it still
remained silent and, as it were, dead to the eye, would go no
farther, but stood in sheer terror and permitted me to go on
alone with La Font. I confess that the loneliness of the house,
and the dreary waste that surrounded it (which seemed to exclude
the idea of trickery) were not without their effect on my
spirits; and that as I dismounted and approached the door, I felt
a kind of chill not remarkable under the circumstances.

But the courage of the gentleman differs from that of the vulgar
in that he fears yet goes; and I lifted the latch, and entered
boldly. The scene which met my eyes inside was sufficiently
commonplace to reassure me. At the farther end of a long bare
room, draughty, half-lighted, and having an earthen floor, yet
possessing that air of homeliness which a wood fire never fails
to impart, sat a single traveller; who had drawn his small table
under the open chimney, and there, with his feet almost in the