They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the woods
with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a growing
disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much for his
courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels. It might
have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was followed as he
ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired to
clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata; or it may be (and
this is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is all another
chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the upright old man with the
eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the young dragoon with
the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.
MORALITY
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.
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