a caged animal, setting his ear to the door to listen if the thing were there and defying it through the wall.
And each time he dozed, overcome by fatigue, he heard the voice that made him leap to his feet.
At last, one night, he rushed to the door, like a coward pushed to the last extremity, and opened it, to see the thing that called him, and force it to be silent.
A gust of cold air struck him full in the face, freezing him to the bone, and he shut the door and thrust home the bolts, without noticing that Sam had rushed out. Then, shuddering, he piled wood on the fire and sat down to warm himself; but suddenly he started. Something was scratching the wall, and weeping.
“Go away,” he cried frantically. He was answered by a long-drawn melancholy wail.
At that, all that was left of his reason succumbed to abject terror. “Go away,” he said again, turning round and round to find a corner to hide in. But the thing outside, still weeping, went all along the side of the house, rubbing against the wall. Ulrich dashed to the oaken sideboard, full of plates and provisions, and, lifting it with superhuman strength, dragged it to the door, to secure himself with a barricade. Then, heaping up all the remaining furniture, bedsteads, mattresses, and chairs, he blocked up the window, as though he were preparing for a siege.
But the thing outside was now uttering great mournful moans, and the young man began to answer in like moans.
Whole days and nights went by, and neither ceased to howl. One ran constantly about the house, scratching at the wall with its nails with such violence that it seemed eager to pull it down; the other, inside, followed its every movement, all huddled up, his ear glued to the stone wall, answering its cries with horrible screams.
One evening Ulrich heard no more noises, and sat down, so worn out with fatigue that he fell asleep immediately.
He woke without memory, without thought, as though his head had been emptied during his sunken slumber. He was hungry; he ate.
The winter was over. The Gemmi pass became practicable again, and the Hauser family set off on their way back to the inn.
As soon as they had reached the summit of the ascent, the women clambered on to their mule and began to talk of the two men whom they would shortly see again.
They were surprised that neither of them had descended a few days earlier, as soon as the road was open, to bring news of their long wintering.
At last they caught sight of the inn, still covered and quilted with snow. The door and the window were closed; a little smoke issued from the roof, a fact that reassured old Hauser. But, drawing nearer, he perceived on the threshold the skeleton of an animal picked clean by the eagles, a large skeleton lying on its side.
They all examined it. “It must be Sam,” said Mme. Hauser, and she shouted: “Hey, Gaspard.”
A cry answered from within, a shrill cry, that sounded like the cry of some animal. “Hey, Gaspard,” repeated old Hauser. Another cry like the first was heard.
Then the three men, the father and the two sons, tried to open the door. It stood fast.
They took from the empty cowshed a long beam to use as a battering-ram, and swung it with all their strength. The wood rang and yielded, the planks flew to pieces; then a great crash shook the house and they saw a man standing inside behind the fallen sideboard, with hair falling to the shoulders, a beard on his chest, gleaming eyes, and rags of cloth upon his body.
They could not recognise him, but Louise Hauser exclaimed: “It’s Ulrich, Mother!” And her mother saw that it was indeed Ulrich, although his hair was white.
He let them come up to him; he let them touch him; but he made no answer to their questions, and had to be taken to Loëche, where the doctors decided that he was mad.
And no one ever knew what had become of his companion.
Louise Hauser nearly died that summer of a decline attributed to the mountain cold.
Are We to Teach Latin?
This question of Latin in our schools, with which we have been bored for some time, reminds me of a story, a story of my youth.
I was finishing my school life with the proprietor of one of those boarding-schools in a large town in the Provinces—the Institution Robineau, celebrated throughout the province for the high standard of the Latin which was taught there.
For ten years the Institution Robineau had beaten in the scholarship examinations the Imperial School of the town and all the colleges of the subprefecture, and its constant success was due, people said, to an usher, a simple usher, M. Piquedent, or rather Daddy Piquedent.
He was one of those grey men, whose age it was impossible to guess, but whose history was plain to read. He had probably taken a place as usher in some school at the age of twenty so that he might have leisure to study for the licentiate in letters, and afterwards for the degree of Doctor of Literature, and had found himself so entangled in this ill-fated life that he had remained an usher forever. But his love for Latin had not left him, and tormented him like a morbid passion. He continued to read poets, prose-writers, historians, to interpret them, to penetrate their meaning, to comment on them with a perseverance which bordered on madness.
One day the idea struck him to make all the pupils of his class answer him only in Latin, and he kept them at it until they were capable of keeping up an entire conversation with him, just as if they were speaking their mother tongue. He listened to them like a conductor at a rehearsal of an orchestra, every now and then striking his desk with his ruler:
“Lefrère, Lefrère,
