At another time we were haunted for several days by an apparition, to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre.  We never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre coming towards him; he hid himself in fear, and the horse and his rider slowly past, while the moonbeams fell on the face of the latter, displaying its unearthly hue.  Sometimes at dead of night, as we watched the sick, we heard one galloping through the town; it was the Black Spectre come in token of inevitable death.  He grew giant tall to vulgar eyes; an icy atmosphere, they said, surrounded him; when he was heard, all animals shuddered, and the dying knew that their last hour was come.  It was Death himself, they declared, come visibly to seize on subject earth, and quell at once our decreasing numbers, sole rebels to his law.  One day at noon, we saw a dark mass on the road before us, and, coming up, beheld the Black Spectre fallen from his horse, lying in the agonies of disease upon the ground.  He did not survive many hours; and his last words disclosed the secret of his mysterious conduct.  He was a French noble of distinction, who, from the effects of plague, had been left alone in his district; during many months, he had wandered from town to town, from province to province, seeking some survivor for a companion, and abhorring the loneliness to which he was condemned.  When he discovered our troop, fear of contagion conquered his love of society.  He dared not join us, yet he could not resolve to lose sight of us, sole human beings who besides himself existed in wide and fertile France; so he accompanied us in the spectral guise I have described, till pestilence gathered him to a larger congregation, even that of Dead Mankind.

It had been well, if such vain terrors could have distracted our thoughts from more tangible evils.  But these were too dreadful and too many not to force themselves into every thought, every moment, of our lives.  We were obliged to halt at different periods for days together, till another and yet another was consigned as a clod to the vast clod which had been once our living mother.  Thus we continued travelling during the hottest season; and it was not till the first of August, that we, the emigrants,—­reader, there were just eighty of us in number,—­entered the gates of Dijon.