"Well, well," answered his master, "we will go a little more slowly, though we must have a canter now and then, if but to make the snow fly. We will ride on straight for that village where the church tower is peeping up over the opposite side of the hill."
"There is a thick wood between us and it," said Martin Grille.
"Doubtless the wood has a road through it," answered his master; and, without further discussion, rode on.
The wood, or rather forest--for it was a limb of the great forest of Corbeil--of which Martin Grille spoke, lay in the hollow between two gentle ranges of hills, upon one of which he and his master were placed at the moment. It was deeper, more extensive, and more intricate than it had appeared to Jean Charost, seeing across from slope to slope, but not high enough to look down upon it as a map. As he directed his horse toward it, however, he soon came upon a road marked out by the track of horses, oxen, and carts, showing that many a person and many a vehicle had passed along it since the snow had fallen; and even had he clearly comprehended that his servant really entertained any apprehensions at all, he would only have laughed at them.
On entering the wood, the snow upon the ground, shining through the bare stems of the trees and the thin, brown branches of the underwood, at first showed every object on either hand for several yards into the thicket. Even the footprints of the hare and the roe-deer could be seen; and Jean Charost, well accustomed to forest sports in his boyhood, paused at one spot, where the bushes were a good deal beaten down, to point out the marks to his servant, and say, "A boar has been through here."
Some way further on, the wood became thicker, oaks and rapidly deciduous trees gave way to the long-persistent beech; and beneath the tall patriarchs of the forest, which had been suffered to grow up almost beyond maturity, a young undergrowth, reserved for firewood, and cut every thirteen or fourteen years, formed a screen into which the eye could not penetrate more than a very few feet. Every here and there, too, were stunted evergreens thickening the copse, and bearing upon their sturdy though dwarfish arms many a large mass of snow which they had caught in its descent toward the ground. Across the road, in one place, was a solid mass of ice, which a few weeks before had been running in a gay rivulet; and not twenty yards further was a little stream of beautiful, limpid water, without a trace of congelation, except a narrow fringe of ice on either bank.
Here Jean Charost pulled up his horse, and then, slackening the rein, let the beast put down his head to drink. Martin Grille did so likewise; but a moment after both heard a sound of voices speaking at some little distance on the left.
"Hark! hark!" whispered Martin Grille. "There are people in the wood--in the very heart of the wood."
"Why, where would you find woodmen but in the wood?" asked Jean Charost. "You will hear their axes presently."
"I hope we shall not feel them," said Martin Grille, in the same low tone. "I declare that the only fine wood scenery I ever saw has been at the back of the fire."