he did it was in the broadest patois of his country. His long grey
beard and retiring habits procured for him the name of the Hermit of
St. Bonnot, though no one for a moment attributed to him any
extraordinary amount of sanctity.

The hermit does not seem to have been suspected for some time, but one
day, as some of the peasants of Chastenoy were returning home from
their work, through the forest, the screams of a child and the deep
baying of a wolf, attracted their notice, and on running in the
direction whence the cries sounded, they found a little girl defending
herself against a monstrous creature, which was attacking her tooth
and nail, and had already wounded her severely in five places. As the
peasants came up, the creature fled on all fours into the gloom of the
thicket; it was so dark that it could not be identified with
certainty, and whilst some affirmed that it was a wolf, others thought
they had recognized the features of the hermit. This took place on the
8th November.

On the 14th a little boy of ten years old was missing, who had been
last seen at a short distance from the gates of Dole.

The hermit of S. Bonnot was now seized and brought to trial at Dole,
when the following evidence was extracted from him and his wife, and
substantiated in many particulars by witnesses.

On the last day of Michaelmas, under the form of a wolf, at a mile
from Dole, in the farm of Gorge, a vineyard belonging to Chastenoy,
near the wood of La Serre, Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden
of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and
claws; he had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the