was all over with me now, I thought, and closing my eyes, and feeling my
forehead growing remarkably moist in spite of the cold, I murmured a
little prayer. When I looked again the brute had vanished, to my
inexpressible relief.

It seemed very astonishing that an animal like a wolf should come into
the house; but I soon remembered that I had seen no dogs about, so that
all kinds of savage, prowling beasts could come in with impunity. It was
getting beyond a joke: but then all this seemed only a fit ending to the
perfectly absurd arrangement into which I had been induced to enter.
"Goodness gracious!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright on my straw bed,
"am I a rational being or an inebriated donkey, or what, to have
consented to such a proposal? It is clear that I was not quite in my
right mind when I made the agreement, and I am therefore not morally
bound to observe it. What! be a field laborer, a hewer of wood and
drawer of water, and sleep on a miserable straw mat in an open porch,
with wolves for visitors at all hours of the night, and all for a few
barbarous rags! I don't know much about plowing and that sort of thing,
but I suppose any able-bodied man can earn a pound a week, and that
would be fifty-two pounds for a suit of clothes. Who ever heard of such
a thing! Wolves and all thrown in for nothing! I daresay I shall have a
tiger dropping in presently just to have a look round. No, no, my
venerable friend, that was all excellent acting about my extraordinary
delusions, and the rest of it, but I am not going to be carried so far
by them as to adhere to such an outrageously one-sided bargain."

Presently I remembered two things--divine Yoletta was the first; and the
second was that thought of the rare pleasure it would be to array myself
in those same "barbarous rags," as I had blasphemously called them.
These things had entered into my soul, and had become a part of