I Questioned At First If I Were Sleepy, For I Felt My Heart Beating Faster Than Usual, As If With An Agreeable Excitement To Which My Mind Remained A Stranger.

But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate.

The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan. I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears.

Twice in the course of the dark hours - once when a stone galled me underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing angry, pawed and stamped upon the road - I was recalled for a brief while to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge of the foliage against the sky.

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