Janenne is on the outskirts of the Forest Country, and in the shooting season the chasseur is a familiar personage. He arrives by evening train or diligence, half a dozen strong. He sups and betakes himself to the singing of comic songs with choruses, moistening and mellowing his vocal chords with plenteous burgundy. Long after everybody else has gone to bed, he tramps in chorus along the echoing unclothed corridor, and he and his chums open bedroom doors to shout Belgian scraps of facetio at each other, or to cast prodigious boots upon the sounding boards. Then long before anybody else has a mind to rise, he is up again promenading the corridor like a multiplied copy of the giant in the Castle of Otranto. He rolls away in the darkness with the cracking of whips and jingling of bells, and sleep and silence settle down again. At night he is back to supper with tales of big game multitudinous as Laban’s flocks, and a bag unaccountably empty. That same evening he is away to desk or counter or studio in Brussels, Antwerp, or LiÈge, and Janenne falls back into its normal peace.

It was mid-December, and the snow was falling in powdery flakes, when a sportsman alighted at the Hotel des Postes, and at the first glance I knew him for a countryman. He was a fine, frank, free-hearted young fellow, one of the most easily likable of youngsters, and we were on friendly terms together before the first evening was over. He knew a number of people in the neighbourhood, had received a dozen invitations to shoot, or thereabouts, and meant to put up three weeks at Janenne, so he told me, shooting when sport was to be had, and on other days tramping about the country. He was accompanied by a bull-terrier, who answered to the name of Scraper, a handsome creature of his kind, with one eye in permanent mourning.

‘Of course he’s no good,’ said the young fellow, in answer to an observation of mine, ‘but then he’s perfectly tamed, and therefore he’s no harm. He’ll stay where he’s told; and I believe the poor beggar would break his heart if I left him behind. Wouldn’t you, old chap?’

The young sportsman went away to the chase next morning, taking his bull-terrier with him, and returning at night reported Scraper’s perfect good behaviour. In the course of that evening’s talk I spoke of certain peculiarities I had noticed in the formation of the country, and my new acquaintance proposed that on an idle day of his next week we should take a walk of exploration. When the day came we started together, and I showed him some of the curiosities of nature I had noticed.

Round and about Janenne the world is hollow. The hills are mere bubbles, and the earth is honeycombed with caverns. By the side of the road which leads to Houssy a river accompanies the traveller’s steps, purling and singing, and talking secrets (as shallow pebbly-bedded streams have a way of doing), and on a sudden the traveller misses it. There, before him, is a river bed, wide, white, and stony, but where is the river? If he be a curious traveller he will retrace his steps, and will find the stream racing with some impetuosity towards a bend, where it dwindles by apparent miracle into nothing. The curious traveller, naturally growing more curious than common in the presence of these phenomena, will, at some risk to his neck, descend the bank, and make inquiry into the reason for the disappearance of the stream. He will see nothing to account for it, but he will probably arrive at the conclusion that there are fissures in the river’s bed, through which the water falls to feed the subterranean stream, of which he is pretty certain to have heard or read. If he will walk back a mile, against the course of the stream, will cross the main street of Janenne, strike the Montcourtois Road there, and cross the river bridge, he will see a cavern lipped by the flowing water, and in that cavern, only a foot or so below the level of the open-air stream, he will find its subterranean continuation. It has worked back upon itself in this secret way, by what strange courses no man knows or can guess. But that the stream is the same has been proved by a device at once ingenious and simple. Colouring matter of various sorts has from time to time been thrown into the water at its place of disappearance, and the tinted stream has poured, hours and hours afterwards, through the cavern, which is only a mile away, and stands so near the earlier stream that in times of rain the waters mingle there.

On the sides of the hills, and in the brushwood which clothes their feet, one finds all manner of holes and caves and crevices, some of them very shallow, and some of them of unknown depth. In the Bois de Janenne alone there are four or five of them.

All this has strictly to do with the history of Schwartz, as will by and by be seen.

When heavy rains fall the river is so swollen that the underground call upon its resources fails to drain it, and it foams above the fissures in full volume, so wild and deep that a passer-by would never guess of the curious trick of nature which is here being played. But the season being exceptionally dry, I was able to show my find, and from the spot of the stream’s disappearance I led my acquaintance to the cavern. Here prowling about in a light-footed and adventurous fashion the young Englishman found a hole in the wall of stone, and, venturing into it, discovered to his great delight a passage which seemed to lead into the very entrails of the hill. He proposed instantly to explore this, and I having that morning purchased of the local tobacconist a box of Italian vestas, each three or four inches long, and calculated to burn for several minutes, and having the same in my pocket at the moment, we set out together on a journey of adventure. The passage varied in width from six to three feet, and in height from eight feet upwards. The faint illumination of the big wax vestas often failed to touch the roof. The way was sometimes over ankle deep in a thick mud, and sometimes strewn with fragments of rock which had fallen from the roof; but we went on gaily until we came to a great slippery boulder, which blocked the passage for some three feet in height. My companion was in act to clamber over this, when the light I carried pinched my thumb and finger with sudden heat, and I dropped it on to the ground. I struck another, and found the youngster perched upon the boulder.

‘Wait a moment,’ said I, ‘and let us see what is beyond. There may be a deepish hole there.’

We leaned over, and could see nothing. My companion got down from the boulder with a grave look.

‘I was just going to jump when you spoke,’ he said. ‘Lucky I didn’t. I wonder how deep it is?’

We hunted about for a stone, and by and by found one about the size of a man’s head. This the youngster tossed over the boulder into the darkness, and we stood looking at each other, by the little clear-burning light of the wax match. I do not know how long we stood there, for time has a knack of magnifying itself beyond belief in such conditions, but it was long, long before an awful hollow boom came rolling to our ears from the depth. We turned without a word, and stumbled back towards the daylight, and when we reached it I looked at the young Englishman and saw that all the roses had faded from his healthy young cheeks, and that he was as gray as ashes.

‘I was going to jump when you spoke,’ he said. ‘Precious lucky for me I didn’t.’

I congratulated him very heartily on not having jumped, and our search for natural wonders being ended we went back to the hotel. We made inquiry there—at first in vain—about this inner cavern, but at last we came across the Garde ChampÊtre of the district, who told us that the depth was unknown. He and some of his friends had had the curiosity to try to measure it, but they never had rope enough.

It befell on the morning of the next day that I wandered out alone, and in the course of the first score yards encountered Schwartz, who was demonstrative of friendly civilities. I returned his salutations, and he gave me to understand in his own too-humble manner that he would like to accompany me. I let him know that I should be delighted by his society, and away we went together. The ground was firm with last night’s frost and musical to the sabots of peasants and the iron-shod feet of horses. The hills and fields were covered with a powdery snow that threw their grays into a dark relief, and the air was so still that I could hear the bell-like tinkle of chisel and stone from the quarry nearly a mile away. We entered the Bois de Janenne together, and wandered through its branchy solitudes by many winding pathways. There is a main road running through this wood, cut by order of the commune for the pleasure of visitors, and the middle of this road was white with a thin untrodden snow. On either side this ribbon of white lay a narrower ribbon of gold where the pines had shed their yellow needles and the overhanging boughs had guarded them from the falling snow. The ground ivy was of all imaginable colours, but only yielded its secrets on a close examination, and did not call upon the eye like some of the louder reds and yellows which still clung to the trees. Here and there the fusain burned like a flame with its vivid scarlet berries—chapeau de curÉ the country people call them, though the colour is a little too gay for less than a cardinal’s wearing. For the most part the undergrowth was bare, and the branches were either purple or of the tone of a ripe filbert, so that the atmosphere, with the reflected dull golds and bluish-reds and reddish-blues, was in a swimming maze like that of a sunset distance, though the eye could scarcely pierce twenty yards into the thick-grown tangle.

Schwartz and I rambled along, now and then exchanging a sign of friendly interest, and in a while we left the main path and wandered where we would. Suddenly Schwartz began to hunt and sniff and bark on what I supposed to be the recent trace of a rabbit or a hare, and I stood still to watch him. He worried industriously here and there until he disappeared behind a clump of brushwood, and then I heard a sudden ‘Yowk!’ of unmistakable terror. After this there was dead silence. I called, but there was not even the rustle of a leaf in answer. I waited a while and called again, but still no answer came. Not in the least guessing what had befallen the dog, I mounted the hillside and came to the clump of bushes behind which he had disappeared. There I found a hole some three feet wide and two in height, a hole with sides of moist earth, formed like an irregularly-shaped funnel, and affording at its farther end little more than room enough for a creature of Schwartz’s size to pass. At the narrow end the earth was freshly disturbed.

I shouted down this reversed trumpet of a hole. I listened after every call I explored the place so far as I could with a six-foot wand cut from a near tree. I heard no movement, no whine of distress, and I touched nothing with the wand except the roof of the cavern into which poor Schwartz had fallen. At length I gave him up for dead, remembering the adventure of the day before, the terrible space of time which had elapsed before the echo of the fallen boulder came booming from the abyss, and thinking it as likely as not that Schwartz had fallen to an equal depth. When I got back to the hotel I told the tale as well as I could, and one of the servants took the news to Schwartz’s master.

When once this lamentable accident had happened, it became surprising to learn how frequently its like had happened before. There was scarcely a sportsman in the village who had not his story of some such disappearance of a dog whilst out shooting. The poor beast would become excited in pursuit of game, would dash headlong into a set of bushes and emerge no more. Then a moment’s examination would reveal the fatal cave. I am certain that I heard a good half-score of such histories. The cave, by the way, was not always fatal, for I heard of cases in which the dog had been known to find his way out of the underground labyrinth, and return home dreadfully thin and hungry, but otherwise undamaged. These cases gave me some faint hope for Schwartz, but as day after day went by the hope faded, and I made up my mind that I had seen the last of him. I was sorry to think so, for he had been very much a friend and a companion.