“Which of these roads leads to Bergenheim?” called out the traveller when they were near enough to speak to each other.

“Bergenheim!” repeated the child, taking off his cotton cap, which was striped like a rainbow, and adding a few words in an unintelligible Gallo-Germanic patois.

“You are not French, then?” asked the stranger, in a disappointed tone.

The shepherd raised his head proudly and replied: 

“I am Alsatian, not French!”

The young man smiled at this trait of local patriotism so common then in the beautiful province by the Rhine; then he thought that pantomime might be necessary, so he pointed with his finger first at one road, then at the other: 

“There or there, Bergenheim?” asked he.

The child, in his turn, pointed silently with the tip of his whip to the banks of the river, designating, at some distance on the other side, a thicket of woods behind which a slight column of smoke was rising.

“The deuce!” murmured the stranger, “it seems that I have gone astray; if the chateau is on the other side, where can I establish my ambuscade?”

The shepherd seemed to understand the traveller’s embarrassment.  Gazing at him with his intelligent blue eyes, he traced, with the tip of his toe in the middle of the road, a furrow across which he rounded his whip like the arch of a bridge; then he pointed a second time up the river.

“You are an honor to your country, young fellow,” exclaimed the stranger; “there is the material in you to make one of Cooper’s redskins.”  As he said these words he threw a piece of money into the child’s cap and walked rapidly away in the direction indicated.

The Alsatian stood motionless for a few moments with one hand in his blond hair and his eyes fastened upon the piece of silver which shone like a star in the bottom of his cap; when the one whom he considered as a model of extraordinary generosity had disappeared behind the trees, he gave vent to his joy by heavy blows from his whip upon the backs of the cattle, then he resumed his way, singing in a still more triumphant tone:  ‘Mantes exultaverunt ut arites’, and jumping higher himself than all the hills and rams in the Bible.

The young man had not walked more than five minutes before he recognized the correctness of the directions he had received.  The ground which he had passed over was a field covered with clumps of low trees; it was easy to see by its disc-like shape that it had been formed by successive alluvia, at the expense of the other shore, which had been incessantly worn away by the stream.  This sort of flat, level peninsula was crossed in a straight line by the road, which deviated from the river at the point where the two roads came together again, like the cross and string of a bow at its extremity.  The trees, becoming thinner, revealed a perspective all the more wonderful as it was unexpected.  While the eye followed the widening stream, which disappeared in the depths of a mountainous gorge, a new prospect suddenly presented itself on the right upon the other shore.