22 November — Help reaches us. 



tage I have ever been able to discover in losing yourself 

 on a cloudy night. 



Alexis had a good supply of cartridges, so I told him 

 to fire both barrels every five minutes. These signals 

 were regularly answered, and we heard to our satis- 

 faction, by the increasing loudness of the distant guns, 

 that our friends were gradually approaching. It was 

 slow and toilsome work, however, for them in the depth 

 of the forest. We waited an hour and a half, firing 

 regularly, before we heard a long cry from the top of 

 the hill. This we answered, and twenty minutes later 

 the forest was suddenly illuminated by the glare of 

 torches, and a scene was accidentally composed which a 

 painter could not have witnessed without finding mate- 

 rial for his art. 



The farmer who rented from me whatever little 

 pasture and arable land there was in the Val Ste. 

 Ve>onique, and my servant Francois, who, amongst 

 other peculiarities, has a deep-seated unbelief in his 

 master's capacity for taking care of himself (which the 

 present adventure was not exactly calculated to remove), 

 had become very anxious when we did not return at 

 dinner-time, as we had promised. They soon arrived 

 at the conclusion that we had lost ourselves in the forest, 

 and organized, by the help of neighbors (who lived five 

 miles away), a very well-arranged little expedition for 

 our relief. Francois had taken care at starting to bring 

 provisions in a heavily charged knapsack, and the first 

 thing he did was to arrange them tidily on the ground. 

 Alexis displayed the wonderful appetite of his age, and 



