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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, by
+Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrated by Walter Crane
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: October 19, 2004  [eBook #535]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES***
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk  Second proof by
+Margaret Price.
+
+
+
+
+
+Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+A New Impression with a Frontispiece by Walter Crane
+London: Chatto & Windus, 1907
+
+[Frontispiece, by Walter Crane: front.jpg]
+
+My Dear Sidney Colvin,
+
+The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and
+fortunate for me.  After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to
+the end.  But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the
+wilderness of this world--all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the
+best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.  He is a fortunate
+voyager who finds many.  We travel, indeed, to find them.  They are the
+end and the reward of life.  They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when
+we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
+
+Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of
+him who writes it.  They alone take his meaning; they find private
+messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for
+them in every corner.  The public is but a generous patron who defrays
+the postage.  Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old
+and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one.  Of what shall
+a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?  And so, my dear
+Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,
+
+R. L. S.
+
+
+
+
+VELAY
+
+
+   Many are the mighty things, and nought is more mighty than man. . . .
+   He masters by his devices the tenant of the fields.
+
+   SOPHOCLES.
+
+   Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?
+
+   JOB.
+
+
+
+THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE
+
+
+In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley
+fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days.  Monastier
+is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of
+language, and for unparalleled political dissension.  There are adherents
+of each of the four French parties--Legitimists, Orleanists,
+Imperialists, and Republicans--in this little mountain-town; and they all
+hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other.  Except for business
+purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid
+aside even the civility of speech.  'Tis a mere mountain Poland.  In the
+midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was
+anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger.  This was not merely from
+the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise
+with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le
+Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this
+big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward
+through the Cevennes.  A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto
+unheard of in that district.  I was looked upon with contempt, like a man
+who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful
+interest, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole.  All were ready
+to help in my preparations; a crowd of sympathisers supported me at the
+critical moment of a bargain; not a step was taken but was heralded by
+glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast.
+
+It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at
+the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to
+be looked for.  I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have
+the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more
+harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk,
+and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure by
+those who trudge on foot.  A tent, above all for a solitary traveller, is
+troublesome to pitch, and troublesome to strike again; and even on the
+march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage.  A sleeping-sack,
+on the other hand, is always ready--you have only to get into it; it
+serves a double purpose--a bed by night, a portmanteau by day; and it
+does not advertise your intention of camping out to every curious passer-
+by.  This is a huge point.  If a camp is not secret, it is but a troubled
+resting-place; you become a public character; the convivial rustic visits
+your bedside after an early supper; and you must sleep with one eye open,
+and be up before the day.  I decided on a sleeping-sack; and after
+repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal of high living for myself and my
+advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed, constructed, and triumphantly
+brought home.
+
+This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two
+triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom
+of the sack by day.  I call it 'the sack,' but it was never a sack by
+more than courtesy: only a sort of long roll or sausage, green waterproof
+cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur within.  It was commodious as a
+valise, warm and dry for a bed.  There was luxurious turning room for
+one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two.  I could bury myself
+in it up to the neck; for my head I trusted to a fur cap, with a hood to
+fold down over my ears and a band to pass under my nose like a
+respirator; and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make myself a little
+tent, or tentlet, with my waterproof coat, three stones, and a bent
+branch.
+
+It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on
+my own, merely human, shoulders.  It remained to choose a beast of
+burden.  Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid,
+delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive
+to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow
+galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's
+an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of
+the voyager.  What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,
+and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to
+a donkey.
+
+There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect
+according to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as
+Father Adam.  Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive
+she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly
+eye and a determined under-jaw.  There was something neat and high-bred,
+a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot.  Our
+first interview was in Monastier market-place.  To prove her good temper,
+one child after another was set upon her back to ride, and one after
+another went head over heels into the air; until a want of confidence
+began to reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was discontinued
+from a dearth of subjects.  I was already backed by a deputation of my
+friends; but as if this were not enough, all the buyers and sellers came
+round and helped me in the bargain; and the ass and I and Father Adam
+were the centre of a hubbub for near half an hour.  At length she passed
+into my service for the consideration of sixty-five francs and a glass of
+brandy.  The sack had already cost eighty francs and two glasses of beer;
+so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her, was upon all accounts the
+cheaper article.  Indeed, that was as it should be; for she was only an
+appurtenance of my mattress, or self-acting bedstead on four castors.
+
+I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the
+witching hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy.  He professed
+himself greatly touched by the separation, and declared he had often
+bought white bread for the donkey when he had been content with black
+bread for himself; but this, according to the best authorities, must have
+been a flight of fancy.  He had a name in the village for brutally
+misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear
+made a clean mark down one cheek.
+
+By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for
+me with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my kit
+and arranged my toilette.  By way of armoury and utensils, I took a
+revolver, a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some halfpenny
+candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask.  The main cargo
+consisted of two entire changes of warm clothing--besides my travelling
+wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, and knitted spencer--some books,
+and my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a
+double castle for cold nights.  The permanent larder was represented by
+cakes of chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage.  All this, except what I
+carried about my person, was easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and by
+good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of
+carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey.  For
+more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais,
+an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a considerable quantity
+of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for myself and donkey, only
+in my scheme of things the destinations were reversed.
+
+Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in
+threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
+in many surprising forms.  Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the nocturnal
+practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my attention.  Yet
+in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left out.  Like
+Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way.  Before telling my
+own mishaps, let me in two words relate the lesson of my experience.  If
+the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full length--not
+doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe.
+The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the imperfection of our
+transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend to overset; but there
+are stones on every roadside, and a man soon learns the art of correcting
+any tendency to overbalance with a well-adjusted stone.
+
+On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we began
+to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the dust.  The
+pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment.  I returned it
+to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street
+outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and
+listening.  The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be
+more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at
+any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a deal of
+freedom.
+
+I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a barde, as they call it--fitted upon
+Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects.  The doubled sack,
+my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my waistcoat), a
+great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing the white bread,
+the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together in a very elaborate
+system of knots, and I looked on the result with fatuous content.  In
+such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the donkey's shoulders,
+with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new pack-saddle that had not
+yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened with brand-new girths that
+might be expected to stretch and slacken by the way, even a very careless
+traveller should have seen disaster brewing.  That elaborate system of
+knots, again, was the work of too many sympathisers to be very artfully
+designed.  It is true they tightened the cords with a will; as many as
+three at a time would have a foot against Modestine's quarters, and be
+hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned afterwards that one thoughtful
+person, without any exercise of force, can make a more solid job than
+half-a-dozen heated and enthusiastic grooms.  I was then but a novice;
+even after the misadventure of the pad nothing could disturb my security,
+and I went forth from the stable door as an ox goeth to the slaughter.
+
+
+
+THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER
+
+
+The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these
+preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common.  As long
+as I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of some
+laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine.  She tripped
+along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait; from
+time to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so small
+under the bundle that my mind misgave me.  We got across the ford without
+difficulty--there was no doubt about the matter, she was docility
+itself--and once on the other bank, where the road begins to mount
+through pine-woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff, and
+with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey.  Modestine brisked up her
+pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former minuet.
+Another application had the same effect, and so with the third.  I am
+worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience to
+lay my hand rudely on a female.  I desisted, and looked her all over from
+head to foot; the poor brute's knees were trembling and her breathing was
+distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a hill.  God
+forbid, thought I, that I should brutalise this innocent creature; let
+her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.
+
+What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was
+something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it
+kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five
+minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of
+the leg.  And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance
+exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went on
+a few yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to
+browse.  The thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly
+broke my heart.  Of all conceivable journeys, this promised to be the
+most tedious.  I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to
+charm my foreboding spirit with tobacco; but I had a vision ever present
+to me of the long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a pair of
+figures ever infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the minute,
+and, like things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to the
+goal.
+
+In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty
+years of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the green
+tail-coat of the country.  He overtook us hand over hand, and stopped to
+consider our pitiful advance.
+
+'Your donkey,' says he, 'is very old?'
+
+I told him, I believed not.
+
+Then, he supposed, we had come far.
+
+I told him, we had but newly left Monastier.
+
+'Et vous marchez comme ca!' cried he; and, throwing back his head, he
+laughed long and heartily.  I watched him, half prepared to feel
+offended, until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, 'You must have no
+pity on these animals,' said he; and, plucking a switch out of a thicket,
+he began to lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a cry.  The
+rogue pricked up her ears and broke into a good round pace, which she
+kept up without flagging, and without exhibiting the least symptom of
+distress, as long as the peasant kept beside us.  Her former panting and
+shaking had been, I regret to say, a piece of comedy.
+
+My deus ex machina, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if
+inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she
+would feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true cry
+or masonic word of donkey-drivers, 'Proot!'  All the time, he regarded me
+with a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to confront; and
+smiled over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over his
+orthography, or his green tail-coat.  But it was not my turn for the
+moment.
+
+I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to
+perfection.  And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the fore-
+noon, and I had a breathing space to look about me.  It was Sabbath; the
+mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down
+through St. Martin de Frugeres, the church was crowded to the door, there
+were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the
+priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior.  It gave me a home
+feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak,
+and all Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed
+feelings, grateful and the reverse.  It is only a traveller, hurrying by
+like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and
+beauty of the great ascetic feast.  The sight of the resting country does
+his spirit good.  There is something better than music in the wide
+unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound
+of a little river or the warmth of sunlight.
+
+In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a
+green end of a valley, with Chateau Beaufort opposite upon a rocky steep,
+and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between them.
+Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an amiable
+stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire.  On all
+sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths, practicable at
+best for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France; and the men and
+women drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up at the snow-clad
+peaks in winter from the threshold of their homes, in an isolation, you
+would think, like that of Homer's Cyclops.  But it is not so; the postman
+reaches Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring youth of Goudet are
+within a day's walk of the railway at Le Puy; and here in the inn you may
+find an engraved portrait of the host's nephew, Regis Senac, 'Professor
+of Fencing and Champion of the two Americas,' a distinction gained by
+him, along with the sum of five hundred dollars, at Tammany Hall, New
+York, on the 10th April 1876.
+
+I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again.  But, alas, as
+we climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, 'Proot!' seemed to
+have lost its virtue.  I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously
+like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor
+intimidated.  She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would
+move her, and that only for a second.  I must follow at her heels,
+incessantly belabouring.  A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she
+relapsed into her own private gait.  I think I never heard of any one in
+as mean a situation.  I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to
+camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I must instantly
+maltreat this uncomplaining animal.  The sound of my own blows sickened
+me.  Once, when I looked at her, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of
+my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased
+my horror of my cruelty.
+
+To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will
+upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman.  He
+and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and
+beat down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado.  If
+the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would
+have fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of consolation--he
+was plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection.  But the incident saddened
+me, as did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex.
+
+It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my
+shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the
+sweat ran into my eyes.  Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket,
+and the pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and
+I had to stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of
+about two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load.
+And at last, in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole hypothec
+turned round and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's belly.  She,
+none better pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to smile; and a
+party of one man, two women, and two children came up, and, standing
+round me in a half-circle, encouraged her by their example.
+
+I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant I
+had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the other
+side.  Judge if I was hot!  And yet not a hand was offered to assist me.
+The man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different shape.
+I suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my predicament, he
+might hold his tongue.  And the good-natured dog agreed with me
+smilingly.  It was the most despicable fix.  I must plainly content
+myself with the pack for Modestine, and take the following items for my
+own share of the portage: a cane, a quart-flask, a pilot-jacket heavily
+weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open basket
+full of meats and bottles.  I believe I may say I am not devoid of
+greatness of soul; for I did not recoil from this infamous burden.  I
+disposed it, Heaven knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and then
+proceeded to steer Modestine through the village.  She tried, as was
+indeed her invariable habit, to enter every house and every courtyard in
+the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, without a hand to help
+myself, no words can render an idea of my difficulties.  A priest, with
+six or seven others, was examining a church in process of repair, and he
+and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my plight.
+
+I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling
+with adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me
+with penitence.  That was in my old light days, before this trouble came
+upon me.  God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I.
+But oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!
+
+A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her
+heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it.  I dropped all
+my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice across
+the face.  It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes, as if
+waiting for another blow.  I came very near crying; but I did a wiser
+thing than that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider my
+situation under the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of brandy.
+Modestine, in the meanwhile, munched some black bread with a contrite
+hypocritical air.  It was plain that I must make a sacrifice to the gods
+of shipwreck.  I threw away the empty bottle destined to carry milk; I
+threw away my own white bread, and, disdaining to act by general average,
+kept the black bread for Modestine; lastly, I threw away the cold leg of
+mutton and the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to my heart.  Thus
+I found room for everything in the basket, and even stowed the boating-
+coat on the top.  By means of an end of cord I slung it under one arm;
+and although the cord cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung almost to the
+ground, it was with a heart greatly lightened that I set forth again.
+
+I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised her.
+If I were to reach the lakeside before dark, she must bestir her little
+shanks to some tune.  Already the sun had gone down into a windy-looking
+mist; and although there were still a few streaks of gold far off to the
+east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold and grey about
+our onward path.  An infinity of little country by-roads led hither and
+thither among the fields.  It was the most pointless labyrinth.  I could
+see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it; but
+choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning away from it, and
+sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along the margin of the
+hills.  The failing light, the waning colour, the naked, unhomely, stony
+country through which I was travelling, threw me into some despondency.  I
+promise you, the stick was not idle; I think every decent step that
+Modestine took must have cost me at least two emphatic blows.  There was
+not another sound in the neighbourhood but that of my unwearying
+bastinado.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust, and,
+as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and the
+road scattered with my dear possessions.  The packing was to begin again
+from the beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better system, I do
+not doubt but I lost half an hour.  It began to be dusk in earnest as I
+reached a wilderness of turf and stones.  It had the air of being a road
+which should lead everywhere at the same time; and I was falling into
+something not unlike despair when I saw two figures stalking towards me
+over the stones.  They walked one behind the other like tramps, but their
+pace was remarkable.  The son led the way, a tall, ill-made, sombre,
+Scottish-looking man; the mother followed, all in her Sunday's best, with
+an elegantly embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a new felt hat atop, and
+proffering, as she strode along with kilted petticoats, a string of
+obscene and blasphemous oaths.
+
+I hailed the son, and asked him my direction.  He pointed loosely west
+and north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening
+his pace for an instant, stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my
+path.  The mother followed without so much as raising her head.  I
+shouted and shouted after them, but they continued to scale the hillside,
+and turned a deaf ear to my outcries.  At last, leaving Modestine by
+herself, I was constrained to run after them, hailing the while.  They
+stopped as I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was
+a handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman.  The son once more
+answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again.  But
+this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and,
+apologising for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
+they had put me on my road.  They were neither of them offended--rather
+mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then the
+mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour.  I replied, in
+the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go herself.  She told
+me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a half's road before her.
+And then, without salutation, the pair strode forward again up the
+hillside in the gathering dusk.
+
+I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
+ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau.  The view,
+looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad.  Mount Mezenc
+and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
+cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
+together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the outline
+of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white irregular patch
+to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a blot where the
+Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a gorge.
+
+Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld a
+village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
+neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout.  The road
+smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the fields;
+and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all, dashed
+past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been to church
+and market.  I asked one of the children where I was.  At Bouchet St.
+Nicolas, he told me.  Thither, about a mile south of my destination, and
+on the other side of a respectable summit, had these confused roads and
+treacherous peasantry conducted me.  My shoulder was cut, so that it hurt
+sharply; my arm ached like toothache from perpetual beating; I gave up
+the lake and my design to camp, and asked for the auberge.
+
+
+
+I HAVE A GOAD
+
+
+The auberge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have
+ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.  Indeed,
+it was typical of these French highlands.  Imagine a cottage of two
+stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a suite,
+so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture of the
+plainest, earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that
+without any convenience but beds.  In the kitchen cooking and eating go
+forward side by side, and the family sleep at night.  Any one who has a
+fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table.  The food is
+sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion more than
+once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to man; and the
+visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing against your
+legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner.
+
+But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves
+friendly and considerate.  As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be
+a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the
+highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their
+hearth.  At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais,
+and asked the host to join me.  He would take but little.
+
+'I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?' he said, 'and I am capable of
+leaving you not enough.'
+
+In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife;
+unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of bread,
+and an iron fork, the table is completely laid.  My knife was cordially
+admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him with
+wonder.
+
+'I should never have guessed that,' he said.  'I would bet,' he added,
+weighing it in his hand, 'that this cost you not less than five francs.'
+
+When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped.
+
+He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly
+ignorant.  His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to
+read, although I do not suppose she ever did so.  She had a share of
+brains and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast.
+
+'My man knows nothing,' she said, with an angry nod; 'he is like the
+beasts.'
+
+And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head.  There was no
+contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted
+loyally, and no more about the matter.
+
+I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood in
+a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got
+home.  'Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there
+were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of
+the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that.'  And she
+interrogated me with a look.
+
+'It is just that,' said I.
+
+'You see,' she added to her husband, 'I understood that.'
+
+They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures.
+
+'In the morning,' said the husband, 'I will make you something better
+than your cane.  Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the
+proverb--dur comme un ane; you might beat her insensible with a cudgel,
+and yet you would arrive nowhere.'
+
+Something better!  I little knew what he was offering.
+
+The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds.  I had one; and I will own
+I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the
+act of mounting into the other.  This was my first experience of the
+sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God
+it be my last as well.  I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the
+woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed
+by my appearance.  As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to
+me than to the pair.  A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the
+single gentleman who has to blush.  But I could not help attributing my
+sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a
+cup of brandy from my flask.  He told me that he was a cooper of Alais
+travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare
+moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker of matches.  Me he
+readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant.
+
+I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my
+toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's
+wife.  I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood
+of Bouchet.  It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty
+clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the
+only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills,
+where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn.
+
+It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I
+had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot.  People were trooping out to
+the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to
+stare upon the stranger.  I had seen them coming back last night, I saw
+them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell.
+
+When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in
+the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my
+compliments upon its beauty.
+
+'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.
+Look, it is too fine.'
+
+Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical
+circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of the
+majority decide the type of beauty.
+
+'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?'
+
+'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a goad.'
+
+Blessed be the man who invented goads!  Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet
+St. Nicolas, who introduced me to their use!  This plain wand, with an
+eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my
+hands.  Thenceforward Modestine was my slave.  A prick, and she passed
+the most inviting stable door.  A prick, and she broke forth into a
+gallant little trotlet that devoured the miles.  It was not a remarkable
+speed, when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at
+the best of it.  But what a heavenly change since yesterday!  No more
+wielding of the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more
+broadsword exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence.  And what
+although now and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse-
+coloured wedge-like rump?  I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed;
+but yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity.  The
+perverse little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must
+even go with pricking.
+
+It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged
+ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the way
+to Pradelles.  I scarce remember an incident but one.  A handsome foal
+with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of
+common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and
+suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and
+galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind.  For a long
+while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the
+note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the
+telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music.
+
+Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by rich
+meadows.  They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the
+neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay.  On
+the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the
+horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir-
+wood and white roads wandering through the hills.  Over all this the
+clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing,
+exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief
+the twisted ribbons of the highway.  It was a cheerless prospect, but one
+stimulating to a traveller.  For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and
+all that I beheld lay in another county--wild Gevaudan, mountainous,
+uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves.
+
+Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you
+may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an
+adventure worth the name.  But here, if anywhere, a man was on the
+frontiers of hope.  For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST,
+the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves.  What a career was his!  He lived ten
+months at free quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and
+children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued
+armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise
+and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing
+before him at the gallop.  He was placarded like a political offender,
+and ten thousand francs were offered for his head.  And yet, when he was
+shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for
+that.  'Though I could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander Pope; the
+Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf,
+they would have changed the history of man.  M. Elie Berthet has made him
+the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again.
+
+I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire that
+I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed many miracles,
+although she was of wood'; and before three-quarters of an hour I was
+goading Modestine down the steep descent that leads to Langogne on the
+Allier.  On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were
+preparing for next spring.  Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked
+stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough.  I saw one of these mild
+formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in Modestine
+and me.  The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an angle to the
+road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those of caryatides
+below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big honest eyes and
+followed us with a ruminating look, until his master bade him turn the
+plough and proceed to reascend the field.  From all these furrowing
+ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer here and there who
+was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind carried away a thin dust
+like so much smoke.  It was a fine, busy, breathing, rustic landscape;
+and as I continued to descend, the highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in
+front of me against the sky.
+
+I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier; so
+near are these two confluents in their youth.  Just at the bridge of
+Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of
+some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, 'D'ou'st-ce-
+que vous venez?'  She did it with so high an air that she set me
+laughing; and this cut her to the quick.  She was evidently one who
+reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I
+crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gevaudan.
+
+
+
+
+UPPER GEVAUDAN
+
+
+   The way also here was very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness; nor
+   was there on all this ground so much as one inn or victualling-house
+   wherein to refresh the feebler sort.
+
+   PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
+
+
+
+A CAMP IN THE DARK
+
+
+The next day (Tuesday, September 24th), it was two o'clock in the
+afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired,
+for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future and have no more
+ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le Cheylard
+l'Eveque, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire.  A man, I was
+told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought it scarce
+too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey might cover
+the same distance in four hours.
+
+All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed
+alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly;
+plentiful hurrying clouds--some dragging veils of straight rain-shower,
+others massed and luminous as though promising snow--careered out of the
+north and followed me along my way.  I was soon out of the cultivated
+basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen, and such-like
+sights of the country.  Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines,
+woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few
+naked cottages and bleak fields,--these were the characters of the
+country.  Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and
+stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three
+or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on
+hillsides or at the borders of a wood.
+
+There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make a
+passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth of
+tracks.  It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and went
+on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure.  Two hours afterwards,
+the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued from a fir-wood
+where I had long been wandering, and found, not the looked-for village,
+but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble hills.  For some time
+past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead; and now, as I came
+out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps
+as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although
+the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms.  These were
+all silently following each other round and round in a circle, now taking
+hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences.  A dance of children
+appeals to very innocent and lively thoughts; but, at nightfall on the
+marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold.  Even I, who am
+well enough read in Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an
+instant on my mind.  The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and
+guiding her like an unruly ship through the open.  In a path, she went
+doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the
+turf or among heather, and the brute became demented.  The tendency of
+lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the
+degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even
+a decently straight course through a single field.
+
+While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and cattle
+began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind.  From
+these I sought direction on my path.  The peasantry in general were but
+little disposed to counsel a wayfarer.  One old devil simply retired into
+his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat and
+shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear.  Another, having given me a
+direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood, complacently
+watched me going wrong without adding a sign.  He did not care a stalk of
+parsley if I wandered all night upon the hills!  As for these two girls,
+they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a thought but mischief.
+One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me follow the cows; and they
+both giggled and jogged each other's elbows.  The Beast of Gevaudan ate
+about a hundred children of this district; I began to think of him with
+sympathy.
+
+Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another wood
+and upon a well-marked road.  It grew darker and darker.  Modestine,
+suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own
+accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble.  It was the first
+sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her.  At the same time,
+the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain
+came flying up out of the north.  At the other side of the wood I sighted
+some red windows in the dusk.  This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three
+houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches.  Here I found a delightful
+old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on
+the road for Cheylard.  He would hear of no reward; but shook his hands
+above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly,
+in unmitigated patois.
+
+All seemed right at last.  My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a
+fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom.  Alas, and I
+was on the brink of new and greater miseries!  Suddenly, at a single
+swoop, the night fell.  I have been abroad in many a black night, but
+never in a blacker.  A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it
+was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a
+tree,--this was all that I could discriminate.  The sky was simply
+darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to
+human eyesight.  I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the
+track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky.
+
+Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the
+country, into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow.  Since Modestine
+had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this
+predicament.  But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from
+the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some
+boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see.  I should have
+camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be so
+short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little
+over a pound for my lady friend.  Add to this, that I and Modestine were
+both handsomely wetted by the showers.  But now, if I could have found
+some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all.  Water,
+however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined
+to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way--'a
+little farther lend thy guiding hand.'
+
+The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish.  In this sensible
+roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind.  To
+this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across country,
+now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to Modestine, until
+I came once more in sight of some red windows.  This time they were
+differently disposed.  It was not Fouzilhic, but Fouzilhac, a hamlet
+little distant from the other in space, but worlds away in the spirit of
+its inhabitants.  I tied Modestine to a gate, and groped forward,
+stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I gained the
+entrance of the village.  In the first lighted house there was a woman
+who would not open to me.  She could do nothing, she cried to me through
+the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next house,
+there was a man who could help me if he had a mind.
+
+They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and
+brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer.  The man was not ill-
+looking, but had a shifty smile.  He leaned against the doorpost, and
+heard me state my case.  All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard.
+
+'C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir,' said he.
+
+I told him that was just my reason for requiring help.
+
+'I understand that,' said he, looking uncomfortable; 'mais--c'est--de la
+peine.'
+
+I was willing to pay, I said.  He shook his head.  I rose as high as ten
+francs; but he continued to shake his head.  'Name your own price, then,'
+said I.
+
+'Ce n'est pas ca,' he said at length, and with evident difficulty; 'but I
+am not going to cross the door--mais je ne sortirai pas de la porte.'
+
+I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do.
+
+'Where are you going beyond Cheylard?' he asked by way of answer.
+
+'That is no affair of yours,' I returned, for I was not going to indulge
+his bestial curiosity; 'it changes nothing in my present predicament.'
+
+'C'est vrai, ca,' he acknowledged, with a laugh; 'oui, c'est vrai.  Et
+d'ou venez-vous?'
+
+A better man than I might have felt nettled.
+
+'Oh,' said I, 'I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you may
+spare yourself the trouble of putting them.  I am late enough already; I
+want help.  If you will not guide me yourself, at least help me to find
+some one else who will.'
+
+'Hold on,' he cried suddenly.  'Was it not you who passed in the meadow
+while it was still day?'
+
+'Yes, yes,' said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognised; 'it was
+monsieur; I told him to follow the cow.'
+
+'As for you, mademoiselle,' said I, 'you are a farceuse.'
+
+'And,' added the man, 'what the devil have you done to be still here?'
+
+What the devil, indeed!  But there I was.
+
+'The great thing,' said I, 'is to make an end of it'; and once more
+proposed that he should help me to find a guide.
+
+'C'est que,' he said again, 'c'est que--il fait noir.'
+
+'Very well,' said I; 'take one of your lanterns.'
+
+'No,' he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again intrenching himself
+behind one of his former phrases; 'I will not cross the door.'
+
+I looked at him.  I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with
+unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his
+tongue, like a detected schoolboy.  I drew a brief picture of my state,
+and asked him what I was to do.
+
+'I don't know,' he said; 'I will not cross the door.'
+
+Here was the Beast of Gevaudan, and no mistake.
+
+'Sir,' said I, with my most commanding manners, 'you are a coward.'
+
+And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to
+retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed again,
+but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter.  Filia barbara pater
+barbarior.  Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of Gevaudan.
+
+The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among
+stones and rubbish-heaps.  All the other houses in the village were both
+dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my
+knocking was unanswered.  It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with
+my curses.  The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising,
+began to dry my coat and trousers.  'Very well,' thought I, 'water or no
+water, I must camp.'  But the first thing was to return to Modestine.  I
+am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and
+if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I
+once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn.
+My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was cold
+as well as boisterous.  How, in this well-wooded district, I should have
+been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries of
+this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an hour to
+the discovery.
+
+At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing
+the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front.  I call it
+a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like
+entering a dungeon.  I felt about until my hand encountered a stout
+branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding
+donkey.  Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of
+the road, and unbuckled the straps.  I knew well enough where the lantern
+was; but where were the candles?  I groped and groped among the tumbled
+articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-
+lamp.  Salvation!  This would serve my turn as well.  The wind roared
+unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the
+leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my
+encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered.  At
+the second match the wick caught flame.  The light was both livid and
+shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness
+of the surrounding night.
+
+I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the
+black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning.
+Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots
+and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a
+pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the
+interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino.  I opened a tin of
+Bologna sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to
+eat.  It may sound offensive, but I ate them together, bite by bite, by
+way of bread and meat.  All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was
+neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself.  But I was rare and hungry;
+ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience.  Then I
+put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck
+and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among
+the sheepskins.
+
+I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating
+faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind
+remained a stranger.  But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue
+leaped between them, and they would no more come separate.  The wind
+among the trees was my lullaby.  Sometimes it sounded for minutes
+together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it
+would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would
+patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon.  Night
+after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this
+perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a
+difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was
+myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind
+sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan.  I hearkened and
+hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and
+subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to
+listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at
+the foreign clamour in my ears.
+
+Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me
+underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing
+angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while
+to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge
+of the foliage against the sky.  When I awoke for the third time
+(Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light, the
+mother of the dawn.  I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the
+ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to
+a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable
+patience.  I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the
+experience of the night.  I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant
+it had been, even in this tempestuous weather.  The stone which annoyed
+me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in
+the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my
+feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of
+the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had
+felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear
+sensations.
+
+With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and,
+breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in
+what part of the world I had awakened.  Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with
+a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray.  I have
+been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such
+as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a
+random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing north from south, as
+strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland
+castaway--was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised.  I was on the
+skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind,
+it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down
+in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.  All around there were
+bare hilltops, some near, some far away, as the perspective closed or
+opened, but none apparently much higher than the rest.  The wind huddled
+the trees.  The golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed
+shiveringly.  Overhead the sky was full of strings and shreds of vapour,
+flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an axis like tumblers,
+as the wind hounded them through heaven.  It was wild weather and
+famishing cold.  I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy,
+and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my
+fingers.  And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack
+and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of
+the east.  We had not gone many steps along the lane, before the sun,
+still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that
+lay ranged along the eastern sky.
+
+The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward.  I
+buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
+with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
+in front of me.  Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
+escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight of
+me, with hands upraised in horror.
+
+'My poor boy!' he cried, 'what does this mean?'
+
+I told him what had happened.  He beat his old hands like clappers in a
+mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the man
+of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.
+
+'This time, at least,' said he, 'there shall be no mistake.'
+
+And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
+and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
+hunted for so long.
+
+
+
+CHEYLARD AND LUC
+
+
+Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching.  A few broken
+ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open
+places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine
+to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this,
+upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley.  What
+went ye out for to see? thought I to myself.  But the place had a life of
+its own.  I found a board, commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for
+the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering
+church.  In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight
+francs ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.'  Some
+of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land.
+Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh;
+while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome.  Thus, to
+the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with
+evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow.
+
+The inn was again singularly unpretentious.  The whole furniture of a not
+ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes,
+the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest.
+There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at
+the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be
+forthcoming.  I was kindly received by these good folk.  They were much
+interested in my misadventure.  The wood in which I had slept belonged to
+them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and
+counselled me warmly to summon him at law--'because I might have died.'
+The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of
+uncreamed milk.
+
+'You will do yourself an evil,' she said.  'Permit me to boil it for
+you.'
+
+After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an
+infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a
+bowl of chocolate for myself.  My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry,
+and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest daughter
+let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my convenience.  Here I
+wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an omelette before I left.  The
+table was thick with dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except
+in winter weather.  I had a clear look up the vent, through brown
+agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a
+handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched by the
+blaze.
+
+The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge
+Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art.  'You will have
+to change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two parts, and then
+you might have double the weight.'
+
+I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto
+created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two.
+
+'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her greatly
+on the march.  Look.'
+
+Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside,
+and blood was running from under her tail.  They told me when I started,
+and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to
+love Modestine like a dog.  Three days had passed, we had shared some
+misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my
+beast of burden.  She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had
+given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but
+aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness.  And I
+own this new discovery seemed another point against her.  What the devil
+was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few
+necessaries?  I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I
+should have to carry Modestine.  AEsop was the man to know the world!  I
+assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march.
+
+It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the
+way; it was a leaden business altogether.  For first, the wind blew so
+rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc;
+and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the
+world.  It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse;
+cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.
+A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the
+road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow.
+
+Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my
+much-inventing spirit can suppose.  For my part, I travel not to go
+anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to
+move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down
+off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite
+underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  Alas, as we get up in life,
+and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that
+must be worked for.  To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out
+of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to
+occupy and compose the mind.  And when the present is so exacting, who
+can annoy himself about the future?
+
+I came out at length above the Allier.  A more unsightly prospect at this
+season of the year it would be hard to fancy.  Shelving hills rose round
+it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks
+alternately naked and hairy with pines.  The colour throughout was black
+or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which
+pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall
+white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty
+quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October.  Through this
+sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size,
+which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais.  The
+weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but
+the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly
+splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.
+
+Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and
+river.  It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old
+castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna.  But the
+inn was clean and large.  The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with
+clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four
+yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its
+array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a
+kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or
+noblemen in disguise.  Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a
+handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun.
+Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal
+tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a
+harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall.  In one of these,
+lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance
+all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time
+to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great
+wood.
+
+
+
+
+OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
+
+
+         'I behold
+   The House, the Brotherhood austere--
+   And what am I, that I am here?'
+
+   MATTHEW ARNOLD.
+
+
+
+FATHER APOLLINARIS
+
+
+Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order.
+The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the
+saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging
+out of either end.  It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and,
+as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low.  But
+it was not without a pang that I had so decided.  For although I had
+purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet
+jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects
+along the line of march.
+
+My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais
+and Gevaudan.  The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more
+naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former
+had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges
+and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits.  Black
+bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and
+here and there were cultivated fields.  A railway ran beside the river;
+the only bit of railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals
+afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station
+standing ready built in Mende.  A year or two hence and this may be
+another world.  The desert is beleaguered.  Now may some Languedocian
+Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods,
+heard YE that whistle?'
+
+At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
+follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the
+modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange
+destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.  The sun
+came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a
+fine wild landscape to the south.  High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire,
+closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery,
+craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in
+the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first.  There was not a sign
+of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his passage,
+save where generation after generation had walked in twisted footpaths,
+in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes.
+The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and
+fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun.  I drew a long breath.  It
+was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for
+the human heart.  I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
+upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my
+boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of
+twopence every day of my life.
+
+But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and
+inclement near at hand.  A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the
+neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the
+outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white
+statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the
+traveller to Our Lady of the Snows.  Here, then, I struck leftward, and
+pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my
+secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.
+
+I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a
+bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the
+sound.  I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror
+than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.  This it is to have had a
+Protestant education.  And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold
+on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did
+not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have
+passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead.  For
+there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a
+mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs.  Every Sunday of my
+childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting
+prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a
+county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough,
+was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes.  He was robed in white like any
+spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his contention
+with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull.  He
+might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all the lively
+parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the farmer's harrow.
+
+I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette.  Durst I address a
+person who was under a vow of silence?  Clearly not.  But drawing near, I
+doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence.  He nodded
+back, and cheerfully addressed me.  Was I going to the monastery?  Who
+was I?  An Englishman?  Ah, an Irishman, then?
+
+'No,' I said, 'a Scotsman.'
+
+A Scotsman?  Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before.  And he looked me
+all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as
+a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator.  From him I learned with
+disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might
+get a meal, perhaps, but that was all.  And then, as our talk ran on, and
+it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew
+landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of
+thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a
+Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father
+Prior, and state my case to him in full.  On second thoughts he
+determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me
+better.  Might he say that I was a geographer?
+
+No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not.
+
+'Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an author.'
+
+It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
+priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed of
+the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England.  And he asked me eagerly
+after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued ever
+since to pray night and morning.
+
+'I thought he was very near the truth,' he said; 'and he will reach it
+yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.'
+
+He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but pleasure
+in this kind and hopeful story.  While he was thus near the subject, the
+good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he found I was not,
+or not after his way, he glossed it over with great good-will.
+
+The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had made
+with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a corner, and
+showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond the wood.  At
+the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad.  We were hard upon the
+monastery.  Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's name) stopped
+me.
+
+'I must not speak to you down there,' he said.  'Ask for the Brother
+Porter, and all will be well.  But try to see me as you go out again
+through the wood, where I may speak to you.  I am charmed to have made
+your acquaintance.'
+
+And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out
+twice, 'I must not speak, I must not speak!' he ran away in front of me,
+and disappeared into the monastery door.
+
+I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
+terrors.  But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
+alike?  I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as
+Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would
+permit.  It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had
+not shown an indecent haste to enter.  I summoned the place in form,
+though with a quaking heart.  Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and
+a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a
+while.  I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled
+the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it
+to the Father Prior.  But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the
+idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on
+strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to
+my reception.  Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I
+and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows.
+
+
+
+THE MONKS
+
+
+Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of thirty-
+five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to stay me
+until dinner.  We had some talk, or rather I should say he listened to my
+prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, like a spirit
+with a thing of clay.  And truly, when I remember that I descanted
+principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that time more
+than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken bread, I
+can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my
+conversation.  But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious;
+and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past.
+
+The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
+garden.  This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and
+beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue of
+the Virgin in the centre.  The buildings stand around it four-square,
+bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other
+features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables.  Brothers in white,
+brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I
+first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their
+prayers.  A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood
+commands it on the other.  It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off
+and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if
+they stood in Eden, with a climate like heaven's, the buildings
+themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my
+part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt
+chilly in and out.
+
+When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty conversible
+Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the liberty to
+speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building which is set
+apart for MM. les retraitants.  It was clean and whitewashed, and
+furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust of the late Pope,
+the Imitation in French, a book of religious meditations, and the Life of
+Elizabeth Seton, evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New
+England in particular.  As far as my experience goes, there is a fair
+field for some more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton
+Mather!  I should like to give him a reading of this little work in
+heaven, where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already,
+and much more; and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and
+gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm.  Over the table, to
+conclude the inventory of the room, hung a set of regulations for MM. les
+retraitants: what services they should attend, when they were to tell
+their beads or meditate, and when they were to rise and go to rest.  At
+the foot was a notable N.B.: 'Le temps libre est employe a l'examen de
+conscience, a la confession, a faire de bonnes resolutions, etc.'  To
+make good resolutions, indeed!  You might talk as fruitfully of making
+the hair grow on your head.
+
+I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned.  An English
+boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me.  I professed my
+willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of
+fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing
+on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the
+ecclesiastical shako.  He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent
+of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw
+an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it
+like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt.
+With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-
+minded like a child.  If I was pleased to have a guide about the
+monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an
+English tongue.
+
+He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
+Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels.  Thence he led me to the
+cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
+brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
+religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and
+interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
+library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the
+Odes et Ballades, if you please, and even Moliere, to say nothing of
+innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.
+Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake
+bread, and make cartwheels, and take photographs; where one superintends
+a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of rabbits.  For in a
+Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his own choice, apart
+from his religious duties and the general labours of the house.  Each
+must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and join in the
+haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private hours, although he
+must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he likes.  Thus I was told
+that one brother was engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris
+busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding
+books.  It is not so long since this Abbot was consecrated, by the way;
+and on that occasion, by a special grace, his mother was permitted to
+enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of consecration.  A proud day
+for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes you glad to think they let
+her in.
+
+In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
+fell in our way.  Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if
+we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to
+ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands,
+almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual
+negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain air
+of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.
+
+The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a
+day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere
+in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in
+the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours
+after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day.  Their meals are
+scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed
+a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence.  Without
+doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve
+not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion from the
+labour of life.  Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should have thought
+this Trappist regimen defective.  And I am astonished, as I look back, at
+the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld.  A
+happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever
+seen.  As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and with the incessant
+occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and death no
+infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows.  This, at least, was what
+was told me.  But if they die easily, they must live healthily in the
+meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour; and the
+only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy of eye, was
+one that served rather to increase the general impression of vivacity and
+strength.
+
+Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can
+only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation.  There is a note,
+in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the curt
+speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to speak
+little.  The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers were
+all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the monastery,
+it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation.  With the
+exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed
+themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects--in
+politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without a certain
+pleasure in the sound of their own voices.
+
+As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they
+bear their solemn and cheerless isolation.  And yet, apart from any view
+of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion
+of women, but in this vow of silence.  I have had some experience of lay
+phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian character; and
+seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily
+dispersed.  With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted
+longer.  In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go
+association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger
+electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of
+youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and
+sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet
+eyes and a caressing accent.  And next after this, the tongue is the
+great divider.
+
+I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule;
+but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me
+as a model of wisdom.  By two in the morning the clapper goes upon the
+bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter, till
+eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided among
+different occupations.  The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries
+from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the refectory, all
+day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from
+two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive
+the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with
+manifold and changing business.  I know many persons, worth several
+thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the disposal of their
+lives.  Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell,
+dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and
+healthful activity of body!  We speak of hardships, but the true hardship
+is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and
+foolish manner.
+
+From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's
+existence.  A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and
+strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could
+not find that many were discouraged.  In the photographer's studio, which
+figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the
+portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot.  This was
+one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and
+drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of
+Algiers.  Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before
+deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to
+finish his novitiate.
+
+This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right.  When the
+Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as
+he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when
+the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried
+him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual
+chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated
+belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has
+gone to God.
+
+At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the
+gallery to hear compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cistercians
+bring every day to a conclusion.  There were none of those circumstances
+which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public
+offices of Rome.  A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the
+surroundings, spoke directly to the heart.  I recall the whitewashed
+chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded
+and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the
+sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant
+beating of the bell, breaking in to show that the last office was over
+and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised
+that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and
+stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night.
+
+But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth Seton's
+memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among the pines
+(for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins the woods)
+disposed me readily to slumber.  I was wakened at black midnight, as it
+seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the first stroke upon
+the bell.  All the brothers were then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in
+life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning the uncomforted
+labours of their day.  The dead in life--there was a chill reflection.
+And the words of a French song came back into my memory, telling of the
+best of our mixed existence:
+
+   'Que t'as de belles filles,
+         Girofle!
+         Girofla!
+   Que t'as de belles filles,
+   L'Amour let comptera!'
+
+And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
+love.
+
+
+
+THE BOARDERS
+
+
+But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows.  At
+this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone in
+the public part of the monastery.  This itself is hard by the gate, with
+a small dining-room on the ground-floor and a whole corridor of cells
+similar to mine upstairs.  I have stupidly forgotten the board for a
+regular retraitant; but it was somewhere between three and five francs a
+day, and I think most probably the first.  Chance visitors like myself
+might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing was
+demanded.  I may mention that when I was going away, Father Michael
+refused twenty francs as excessive.  I explained the reasoning which led
+me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour,
+he would not accept it with his own hand.  'I have no right to refuse for
+the monastery,' he explained, 'but I should prefer if you would give it
+to one of the brothers.'
+
+I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two
+other guests.  One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that
+morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of
+solitude and prayer.  He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour
+and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he
+had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy
+portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock,
+through the bleak hills of Gevaudan.  The other was a short, grizzling,
+thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted
+spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole.  This
+last was a hard person to classify.  He was an old soldier, who had seen
+service and risen to the rank of commandant; and he retained some of the
+brisk decisive manners of the camp.  On the other hand, as soon as his
+resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady of the Snows as a
+boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways, had decided to remain
+as a novice.  Already the new life was beginning to modify his
+appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and smiling air
+of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a Trappist, but
+partook of the character of each.  And certainly here was a man in an
+interesting nick of life.  Out of the noise of cannon and trumpets, he
+was in the act of passing into this still country bordering on the grave,
+where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like phantoms,
+communicate by signs.
+
+At supper we talked politics.  I make it my business, when I am in
+France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the
+example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the example
+of Carthage.  The priest and the commandant assured me of their sympathy
+with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness of
+contemporary feeling.
+
+'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely
+agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.'
+
+They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian.
+
+While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a
+word in praise of Gambetta's moderation.  The old soldier's countenance
+was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat
+the table like a naughty child.
+
+'Comment, monsieur?' he shouted.  'Comment?  Gambetta moderate?  Will you
+dare to justify these words?'
+
+But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk.  And suddenly, in
+the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on
+his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a
+flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word.
+
+It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th),
+that this couple found out I was a heretic.  I suppose I had misled them
+by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it
+was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out.  I had been
+tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father
+Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious
+weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, 'You must be a
+Catholic and come to heaven.'  But I was now among a different sect of
+orthodox.  These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the
+worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse.
+The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse.
+
+'Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?' he demanded;
+and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his
+accent.
+
+I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing.
+
+But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude.  'No, no,' he
+cried; 'you must change.  You have come here, God has led you here, and
+you must embrace the opportunity.'
+
+I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I
+was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men
+circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life.
+
+'Your father and mother?' cried the priest.  'Very well; you will convert
+them in their turn when you go home.'
+
+I think I see my father's face!  I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion
+in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family
+theologian.
+
+But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my
+conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the
+people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
+1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself.  It was an odd but most
+effective proselytising.  They never sought to convince me in argument,
+where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I
+was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the
+point of time.  Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the
+Snows, now was the appointed hour.
+
+'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my
+encouragement.
+
+For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
+never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
+or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
+praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
+created was both unfair and painful.  I committed my second fault in
+tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
+we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
+undiscriminating Friend and Father.  That, as it seems to lay spirits,
+would be the only gospel worthy of the name.  But different men think
+differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
+with all the terrors of the law.  He launched into harrowing details of
+hell.  The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he
+had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
+he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to
+occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
+tortures.  And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
+his enthusiasm.
+
+As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since
+the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him.
+
+'C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire,' observed the commandant; 'et
+celui de monsieur comme pretre.'
+
+'Oui,' added the cure, sententiously nodding; 'comme ancien militaire--et
+comme pretre.'
+
+At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came
+one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with an
+Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in a
+milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant
+brethren.  Look at him, he said.  The rule was very hard; he would have
+dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy--it was well known how
+beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists
+in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was.
+
+I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has dubbed
+me, 'a faddling hedonist,' for this description of the brother's motives
+gave me somewhat of a shock.  I should have preferred to think he had
+chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and this
+shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good Trappists,
+even when I was doing my best to sympathise.  But to the cure the
+argument seemed decisive.
+
+'Hear that!' he cried.  'And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a
+marquis'--he repeated the holy word three times over--'and other persons
+high in society; and generals.  And here, at your side, is this
+gentleman, who has been so many years in armies--decorated, an old
+warrior.  And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God.'
+
+I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and
+made my escape from the apartment.  It was a furious windy morning, with
+a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I
+wandered until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely
+staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking
+views.
+
+At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and
+on this occasion still more distastefully to me.  The priest asked me
+many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received
+my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter.
+
+'Your sect,' he said once; 'for I think you will admit it would be doing
+it too much honour to call it a religion.'
+
+'As you please, monsieur,' said I.  'La parole est a vous.'
+
+At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his own
+ground and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding a
+claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this
+uncivil usage.  He was sadly discountenanced.
+
+'I assure you,' he said, 'I have no inclination to laugh in my heart.  I
+have no other feeling but interest in your soul.'
+
+And there ended my conversion.  Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver;
+but a country parson, full of zeal and faith.  Long may he tread Gevaudan
+with his kilted skirts--a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his
+parishioners in death!  I daresay he would beat bravely through a
+snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most
+faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.
+
+
+
+UPPER GEVAUDAN (continued)
+
+
+   The bed was made, the room was fit,
+   By punctual eve the stars were lit;
+   The air was still, the water ran;
+   No need there was for maid or man,
+   When we put up, my ass and I,
+   At God's green caravanserai.
+
+   OLD PLAY.
+
+
+
+ACROSS THE GOULET
+
+
+The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under
+better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate.  My
+Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way.  As we came through the
+wood, there was Pere Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted
+his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand
+between both of his in front of him.  I parted first from one and then
+from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the
+traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth upon
+another.  Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier, which
+here led us back into Gevaudan towards its sources in the forest of
+Mercoire.  It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its guidance.
+Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau, until we
+reached Chasserades at sundown.
+
+The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in survey
+for one of the projected railways.  They were intelligent and
+conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until the
+state of the clock frightened us to rest.  There were four beds in the
+little upstairs room; and we slept six.  But I had a bed to myself, and
+persuaded them to leave the window open.
+
+'He, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!' was the cry that wakened me in the
+morning (Saturday, September 28th).  The room was full of a transparent
+darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the five
+different nightcaps on the pillows.  But out of the window the dawn was
+growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about to
+flood the plateau.  The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a promise
+of calm weather, which was perfectly fulfilled.  I was soon under way
+with Modestine.  The road lay for a while over the plateau, and then
+descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the Chassezac.
+This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the world by its
+steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there was a hamlet
+sending up its smoke.
+
+At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking this
+deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet.  It wound up
+through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and birch, and with
+every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some new interest.  Even
+in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck by a noise like that
+of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of many miles; but this, as
+I continued to mount and draw nearer to it, seemed to change in
+character, and I found at length that it came from some one leading
+flocks afield to the note of a rural horn.  The narrow street of
+Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall--black sheep and white,
+bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each one
+accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck.  It made a
+pathetic concert, all in treble.  A little higher, and I passed a pair of
+men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
+of a bourree.  Still further, and when I was already threading the
+birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
+with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive air
+from one of the upland villages.  I pictured to myself some grizzled,
+apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in the
+clear autumn sunshine.  All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled
+my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once
+past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of
+the world.  Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds
+and a bleak country.  The first part of my journey ended here; and this
+was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful.
+
+There are other degrees of feyness, as of punishment, besides the
+capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I
+relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers.  The road zigzagged so
+widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and
+struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher
+level.  It was my one serious conflict with Modestine.  She would none of
+my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I
+had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse
+flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn.  I plied the goad with one
+hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the pack-
+saddle.  Half-a-dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top of
+me; half-a-dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly
+giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road.  But I took
+the thing as a wager, and fought it through.  I was surprised, as I went
+on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my
+hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the cloudless sky.  But
+it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow.
+
+Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road--only upright
+stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers.  The turf
+underfoot was springy and well scented.  I had no company but a lark or
+two, and met but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard.  In
+front of me I saw a shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the
+Lozere, sparsely wooded and well enough modelled in the flanks, but
+straight and dull in outline.  There was scarce a sign of culture; only
+about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a
+range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side
+with the bells of flocks and herds.
+
+
+
+A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES
+
+
+From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to
+scale a portion of the Lozere.  An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me
+forward; and I met nearly half-a-dozen bullock-carts descending from the
+woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing.  At the
+top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I
+struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of green
+turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to serve me
+for a water-tap.  'In a more sacred or sequestered bower . . . nor nymph
+nor faunus haunted.'  The trees were not old, but they grew thickly round
+the glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon distant hill-
+tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment felt secure and
+private like a room.  By the time I had made my arrangements and fed
+Modestine, the day was already beginning to decline.  I buckled myself to
+the knees into my sack and made a hearty meal; and as soon as the sun
+went down, I pulled my cap over my eyes and fell asleep.
+
+Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it
+passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are
+marked by changes in the face of Nature.  What seems a kind of temporal
+death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and
+living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.  All night long he can hear
+Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns
+and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in
+houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping
+hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet.  It is then that
+the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a
+cheerful watchman speeding the course of night.  Cattle awake on the
+meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new
+lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the
+fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.
+
+At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these
+sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life?  Do the stars rain down
+an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our
+resting bodies?  Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest
+read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of this
+nightly resurrection.  Towards two in the morning they declare the thing
+takes place; and neither know nor inquire further.  And at least it is a
+pleasant incident.  We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the
+luxurious Montaigne, 'that we may the better and more sensibly relish
+it.'  We have a moment to look upon the stars.  And there is a special
+pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with
+all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of
+the Bastille of civilisation, and are become, for the time being, a mere
+kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock.
+
+When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty.  My tin was
+standing by me half full of water.  I emptied it at a draught; and
+feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to
+make a cigarette.  The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but
+not frosty.  A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way.  All around
+me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still.  By the whiteness
+of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the
+length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward;
+but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the
+runnel over the stones.  I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of
+the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish
+grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the
+stars.  As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring.  This I
+could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at
+each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a second
+the highest light in the landscape.
+
+A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed
+down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the
+air was being renewed all night long.  I thought with horror of the inn
+at Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the
+nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys
+and close rooms.  I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of
+myself, nor felt more independent of material aids.  The outer world,
+from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable
+place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting
+for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.  I thought I had
+rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid
+from political economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure
+for myself.  And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became
+aware of a strange lack.  I wished a companion to lie near me in the
+starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch.  For there is a
+fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood,
+is solitude made perfect.  And to live out of doors with the woman a man
+loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
+
+As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards
+me through the pines.  I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks
+or the barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and
+gradually it took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware that
+a passenger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and singing
+loudly as he went.  There was more of good-will than grace in his
+performance; but he trolled with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice
+took hold upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the leafy glens.  I
+have heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of them sang;
+one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes.  I have heard the rattle
+of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of stillness, and
+pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as I lay abed.
+There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black hours, and with
+something of a thrill we try to guess their business.  But here the
+romance was double: first, this glad passenger, lit internally with wine,
+who sent up his voice in music through the night; and then I, on the
+other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking alone in the pine-woods
+between four and five thousand feet towards the stars.
+
+When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had
+disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned
+visibly overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light
+upon the horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake.
+Day was at hand.  I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my
+boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my
+can at the water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some
+chocolate.  The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so
+sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting
+into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais.  A solemn glee possessed
+my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day.  I heard the runnel
+with delight; I looked round me for something beautiful and unexpected;
+but the still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass,
+remained unchanged in figure.  Nothing had altered but the light, and
+that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breathing peace, and
+moved me to a strange exhilaration.
+
+I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and
+strolled here and there, and up and down about the glade.  While I was
+thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured
+direct out of the quarter of the morning.  It was cold, and set me
+sneezing.  The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its
+passage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along the edge
+of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden east.  Ten
+minutes after, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside,
+scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely.
+
+I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay
+before me; but I had something on my mind.  It was only a fancy; yet a
+fancy will sometimes be importunate.  I had been most hospitably received
+and punctually served in my green caravanserai.  The room was airy, the
+water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment.  I say nothing
+of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I
+commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all
+this liberal entertainment.  And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing
+way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had
+left enough for my night's lodging.  I trust they did not fall to some
+rich and churlish drover.
+
+
+
+
+THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS
+
+
+   We travelled in the print of olden wars;
+         Yet all the land was green;
+         And love we found, and peace,
+         Where fire and war had been.
+   They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
+         No more the sword they wield;
+         And O, how deep the corn
+         Along the battlefield!
+
+   W. P. BANNATYNE.
+
+
+
+ACROSS THE LOZERE
+
+
+The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I
+continued to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such
+as had conducted me across the Goulet.  It was already warm.  I tied my
+jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat.  Modestine
+herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first
+time in my experience, into a jolting trot that set the oats swashing in
+the pocket of my coat.  The view, back upon the northern Gevaudan,
+extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon
+the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and gold
+in the haze and sunlight of the morning.  A multitude of little birds
+kept sweeping and twittering about my path; they perched on the stone
+pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and I saw them circle in
+volleys in the blue air, and show, from time to time, translucent
+flickering wings between the sun and me.
+
+Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a
+distant surf, had filled my ears.  Sometimes I was tempted to think it
+the voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result
+of the utter stillness of the hill.  But as I continued to advance, the
+noise increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea-urn, and
+at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the direction
+of the summit.  At length I understood.  It was blowing stiffly from the
+south upon the other slope of the Lozere, and every step that I took I
+was drawing nearer to the wind.
+
+Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last that
+my eyes rose above the summit.  A step that seemed no way more decisive
+than many other steps that had preceded it--and, 'like stout Cortez when,
+with eagle eyes, he stared on the Pacific,' I took possession, in my own
+name, of a new quarter of the world.  For behold, instead of the gross
+turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a view into the hazy air of
+heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills below my feet.
+
+The Lozere lies nearly east and west, cutting Gevaudan into two unequal
+parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then
+standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea,
+and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the
+Mediterranean Sea.  I have spoken with people who either pretended or
+believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships sailing
+by Montpellier and Cette.  Behind was the upland northern country through
+which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood, without much
+grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little beside wolves.
+But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new Gevaudan, rich,
+picturesque, illustrious for stirring events.  Speaking largely, I was in
+the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey; but there is a
+strict and local sense in which only this confused and shaggy country at
+my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ
+the word.  These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the
+Cevennes.  In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a
+war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with
+all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand
+Protestant mountaineers upon the other.  A hundred and eighty years ago,
+the Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where I stood; they had
+an organisation, arsenals, a military and religious hierarchy; their
+affairs were 'the discourse of every coffee-house' in London; England
+sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied and murdered; with
+colours and drums, and the singing of old French psalms, their bands
+sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled cities, and dispersed
+the generals of the king; and sometimes at night, or in masquerade,
+possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged treachery upon their
+allies and cruelty upon their foes.  There, a hundred and eighty years
+ago, was the chivalrous Roland, 'Count and Lord Roland, generalissimo of
+the Protestants in France,' grave, silent, imperious, pock-marked
+ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his wanderings out of love.  There
+was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a genius for war, elected
+brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at fifty-five the English
+governor of Jersey.  There again was Castanet, a partisan leader in a
+voluminous peruke and with a taste for controversial divinity.  Strange
+generals, who moved apart to take counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled
+or offered battle, set sentinels or slept in an unguarded camp, as the
+Spirit whispered to their hearts!  And there, to follow these and other
+leaders, was the rank and file of prophets and disciples, bold, patient,
+indefatigable, hardy to run upon the mountains, cheering their rough life
+with psalms, eager to fight, eager to pray, listening devoutly to the
+oracles of brain-sick children, and mystically putting a grain of wheat
+among the pewter balls with which they charged their muskets.
+
+I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of
+nothing more notable than the child-eating beast of Gevaudan, the
+Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves.  But now I was to go down into the scene of
+a romantic chapter--or, better, a romantic footnote in the history of the
+world.  What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism?  I was told
+that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant
+resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery
+parlour.  But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively
+and generous tradition.  Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people
+are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than
+charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and
+reprisal--in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the Camisard
+rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic peasantry
+into legalised revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard and Florentin
+skulked for each other's lives among the mountains?
+
+Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the
+series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little below,
+a sort of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope, turning
+like a corkscrew as it went.  It led into a valley between falling hills,
+stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and floored farther down
+with green meadows.  I followed the track with precipitation; the
+steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning of the line of the
+descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding something new in a new
+country, all conspired to lend me wings.  Yet a little lower and a stream
+began, collecting itself together out of many fountains, and soon making
+a glad noise among the hills.  Sometimes it would cross the track in a
+bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which Modestine refreshed her feet.
+
+The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished.
+I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path,
+and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere.  The
+track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations.  I passed
+cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human
+creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream.  I was, however,
+in a different country from the day before.  The stony skeleton of the
+world was here vigorously displayed to sun and air.  The slopes were
+steep and changeful.  Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown,
+wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and luminous
+colours.  Here and there another stream would fall in from the right or
+the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary boulders.  The river
+in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a river, collecting on all
+hands as it trotted on its way) here foamed a while in desperate rapids,
+and there lay in pools of the most enchanting sea-green shot with watery
+browns.  As far as I have gone, I have never seen a river of so changeful
+and delicate a hue; crystal was not more clear, the meadows were not by
+half so green; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill of longing to be
+out of these hot, dusty, and material garments, and bathe my naked body
+in the mountain air and water.  All the time as I went on I never forgot
+it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a perpetual reminder; and I heard
+in spirit the church-bells clamouring all over Europe, and the psalms of
+a thousand churches.
+
+At length a human sound struck upon my ear--a cry strangely modulated
+between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a
+little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and
+dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance.  But the rogue had
+picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood,
+driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in
+this tremulous high-pitched salutation.  And as all noises are lovely and
+natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much clean
+hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my ear,
+and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river.
+
+A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at
+Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.
+
+
+
+PONT DE MONTVERT
+
+
+One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I
+remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of
+other novelties.  A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England
+from a town in France, or even in Scotland.  At Carlisle you can see you
+are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure
+that you are in the other.  I should find it difficult to tell in what
+particulars Pont de Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or even
+Bleymard; but the difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the eyes.
+The place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring river-bed, wore an
+indescribable air of the South.
+
+All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-house, as all had
+been Sabbath peace among the mountains.  There must have been near a
+score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and
+drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came
+dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes.  In crossing the
+Lozere I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into the
+territory of a different race.  These people, as they hurriedly
+despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned
+and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I
+had met, except among the railway folk at Chasserades.  They had open
+telling faces, and were lively both in speech and manner.  They not only
+entered thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but more than one
+declared, if he were rich enough, he would like to set forth on such
+another.
+
+Even physically there was a pleasant change.  I had not seen a pretty
+woman since I left Monastier, and there but one.  Now of the three who
+sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful--a poor timid
+thing of forty, quite troubled at this roaring table d'hote, whom I
+squired and helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to encourage,
+with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both married, were both
+more handsome than the average of women.  And Clarisse?  What shall I say
+of Clarisse?  She waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance,
+like a performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous
+languor; her features, although fleshy, were of an original and accurate
+design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke of dainty pride; her
+cheek fell into strange and interesting lines.  It was a face capable of
+strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the promise of delicate
+sentiment.  It seemed pitiful to see so good a model left to country
+admirers and a country way of thought.  Beauty should at least have
+touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a weight that lay upon
+it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an elegance, learns a gait
+and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment, patet dea.  Before I left I
+assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration.  She took it like milk, without
+embarrassment or wonder, merely looking at me steadily with her great
+eyes; and I own the result upon myself was some confusion.  If Clarisse
+could read English, I should not dare to add that her figure was unworthy
+of her face.  Hers was a case for stays; but that may perhaps grow better
+as she gets up in years.
+
+Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a
+place memorable in the story of the Camisards.  It was here that the war
+broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop
+Sharp.  The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the
+other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern
+days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs.  The Protestants
+were one and all beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow.  They
+were all prophets and prophetesses.  Children at the breast would exhort
+their parents to good works.  'A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke
+from its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud
+voice.'  Marshal Villars has seen a town where all the women 'seemed
+possessed by the devil,' and had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies
+publicly upon the streets.  A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at
+Montpellier because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, and she declared
+that she was weeping tears of blood for the misfortunes of the
+Protestants.  And it was not only women and children.  Stalwart dangerous
+fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest axe, were
+likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with sobs and
+streaming tears.  A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted near a
+score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; hanging,
+burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had left
+their hoof-marks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in the
+galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a thought
+was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant.
+
+Now the head and forefront of the persecution--after Lamoignon de
+Bavile--Francois de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Cheila), Archpriest of
+the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house
+in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert.  He was a
+conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a
+pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the
+moderation of which he is capable.  A missionary in his youth in China,
+he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and
+brought back to life by the charity of a pariah.  We must suppose the
+pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act.
+Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the
+desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put
+together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a
+Christian persecutor.  The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went
+roundly forward in his hands.  His house in Pont de Montvert served him
+as a prison.  There he closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal,
+and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they
+were deceived in their opinions.  And yet had not he himself tried and
+proved the inefficacy of these carnal arguments among the Buddhists in
+China?
+
+Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly
+forbidden.  One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the mountain-
+paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety to
+Geneva; and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women
+dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands.
+The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the woods
+of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one Seguier--Spirit
+Seguier, as his companions called him--a wool-carder, tall, black-faced,
+and toothless, but a man full of prophecy.  He declared, in the name of
+God, that the time for submission had gone by, and they must betake
+themselves to arms for the deliverance of their brethren and the
+destruction of the priests.
+
+The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of
+Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices of
+many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the town.  It
+was ten at night; he had his court about him, priests, soldiers, and
+servants, to the number of twelve or fifteen; and now dreading the
+insolence of a conventicle below his very windows, he ordered forth his
+soldiers to report.  But the psalm-singers were already at his door,
+fifty strong, led by the inspired Seguier, and breathing death.  To their
+summons, the archpriest made answer like a stout old persecutor, and bade
+his garrison fire upon the mob.  One Camisard (for, according to some, it
+was in this night's work that they came by the name) fell at this
+discharge: his comrades burst in the door with hatchets and a beam of
+wood, overran the lower story of the house, set free the prisoners, and
+finding one of them in the vine, a sort of Scavenger's Daughter of the
+place and period, redoubled in fury against Du Chayla, and sought by
+repeated assaults to carry the upper floors.  But he, on his side, had
+given absolution to his men, and they bravely held the staircase.
+
+'Children of God,' cried the prophet, 'hold your hands.  Let us burn the
+house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal.'
+
+The fire caught readily.  Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men
+lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some
+escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the
+archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the
+hedge.  What were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near?  A
+poor, brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely
+according to his light both in the Cevennes and China.  He found at least
+one telling word to say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and the
+upbursting flames discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged him
+to the public place of the town, raging and calling him damned--'If I be
+damned,' said he, 'why should you also damn yourselves?'
+
+Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his
+inspectorship he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary
+direction; and these he was now to hear.  One by one, Seguier first, the
+Camisards drew near and stabbed him.  'This,' they said, 'is for my
+father broken on the wheel.  This for my brother in the galleys.  That
+for my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents.'  Each
+gave his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around
+the body till the dawn.  With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away
+towards Frugeres, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance,
+leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with two-
+and-fifty wounds upon the public place.
+
+'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems
+as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon
+the Tarn.  But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de
+Montvert, with the departure of the Camisards.  The career of Seguier was
+brief and bloody.  Two more priests and a whole family at Ladeveze, from
+the father to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet he
+was but a day or two at large, and restrained all the time by the
+presence of the soldiery.  Taken at length by a famous soldier of
+fortune, Captain Poul, he appeared unmoved before his judges.
+
+'Your name?' they asked.
+
+'Pierre Seguier.'
+
+'Why are you called Spirit?'
+
+'Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me.'
+
+'Your domicile?'
+
+'Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven.'
+
+'Have you no remorse for your crimes?'
+
+'I have committed none.  My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of
+fountains.'
+
+At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand
+stricken from his body, and was burned alive.  And his soul was like a
+garden?  So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr.  And
+perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own
+composure might seem little less surprising.
+
+Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the
+bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the
+terrace-garden into which he dropped.
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN
+
+
+A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the
+Tarn; a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of
+the cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and
+out, as I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of afternoon
+sun.  This was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep turning gully in
+the hills, with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse uproar far below, and
+craggy summits standing in the sunshine high above.  A thin fringe of ash-
+trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a ruin; but on the lower
+slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish chestnut-trees stood each four-
+square to heaven under its tented foliage.  Some were planted, each on
+its own terrace no larger than a bed; some, trusting in their roots,
+found strength to grow and prosper and be straight and large upon the
+rapid slopes of the valley; others, where there was a margin to the
+river, stood marshalled in a line and mighty like cedars of Lebanon.  Yet
+even where they grew most thickly they were not to be thought of as a
+wood, but as a herd of stalwart individuals; and the dome of each tree
+stood forth separate and large, and as it were a little hill, from among
+the domes of its companions.  They gave forth a faint sweet perfume which
+pervaded the air of the afternoon; autumn had put tints of gold and
+tarnish in the green; and the sun so shone through and kindled the broad
+foliage, that each chestnut was relieved against another, not in shadow,
+but in light.  A humble sketcher here laid down his pencil in despair.
+
+I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of how
+they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping foliage
+like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns like the
+pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered bole can
+put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins
+of the old.  Thus they partake of the nature of many different trees; and
+even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the sky, have a
+certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination.  But their
+individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the richer
+and the more original.  And to look down upon a level filled with these
+knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts
+cluster 'like herded elephants' upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise
+to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature.
+
+Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made
+little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun, although
+still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the narrow valley
+of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in.  This was not
+easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground, where it was
+unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon.  I should have
+slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet or my head
+in the river.
+
+After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little
+plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the trunk
+of an aged and enormous chestnut.  Thither, with infinite trouble, I
+goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to unload
+her.  There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had to go
+nearly as high again before I found so much as standing-room for the ass.
+It was on a heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace, certainly
+not five feet square in all.  Here I tied her to a chestnut, and having
+given her corn and bread and made a pile of chestnut-leaves, of which I
+found her greedy, I descended once more to my own encampment.
+
+The position was unpleasantly exposed.  One or two carts went by upon the
+road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the
+world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut
+trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of
+jocular persons in the night.  Moreover, I saw that I must be early
+awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the scene of industry no
+further gone than on the day before.  The slope was strewn with lopped
+branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped
+against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants
+use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals.  I picked a meal
+in fear and trembling, half lying down to hide myself from the road; and
+I daresay I was as much concerned as if I had been a scout from Joani's
+band above upon the Lozere, or from Salomon's across the Tarn, in the old
+times of psalm-singing and blood.  Or, indeed, perhaps more; for the
+Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a tale comes back into
+my memory of how the Count of Gevaudan, riding with a party of dragoons
+and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all the
+country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and found Cavalier and
+his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their hats crowned with
+box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen in the stream.
+Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony Watteau would be
+painting similar subjects.
+
+This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool
+and silent pine-woods.  It was warm and even stifling in the valley.  The
+shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in
+it, rang up from the river-side before the sun was down.  In the growing
+dusk, faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves;
+from time to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my
+ear; and from time to time I thought I could see the movement of
+something swift and indistinct between the chestnuts.  A profusion of
+large ants swarmed upon the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes
+droned overhead.  The long boughs with their bunches of leaves hung
+against the sky like garlands; and those immediately above and around me
+had somewhat the air of a trellis which should have been wrecked and half
+overthrown in a gale of wind.
+
+Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to
+feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a
+noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly
+confess it, brought my heart into my mouth.
+
+It was such a noise as a person would make scratching loudly with a
+finger-nail; it came from under the knapsack which served me for a
+pillow, and it was thrice repeated before I had time to sit up and turn
+about.  Nothing was to be seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few
+of these mysterious rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless
+accompaniment of the river and the frogs.  I learned next day that the
+chestnut gardens are infested by rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping
+were probably all due to these; but the puzzle, for the moment, was
+insoluble, and I had to compose myself for sleep, as best I could, in
+wondering uncertainty about my neighbours.
+
+I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the
+sound of foot-steps not far off upon the stones, and opening my eyes, I
+beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had
+not hitherto observed.  He turned his head neither to the right nor to
+the left, and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage.  Here was
+an escape!  But it was plainly more than time to be moving.  The
+peasantry were abroad; scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript
+position than the soldiers of Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard.  I
+fed Modestine with what haste I could; but as I was returning to my sack,
+I saw a man and a boy come down the hillside in a direction crossing
+mine.  They unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inarticulate but
+cheerful sounds, and hurried forward to get into my gaiters.
+
+The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the plateau,
+and stood close beside me for some time in silence.  The bed was open,
+and I saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the blue
+wool.  At last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence had
+grown laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed unfriendly
+tones:
+
+'You have slept here?'
+
+'Yes,' said I.  'As you see.'
+
+'Why?' he asked.
+
+'My faith,' I answered lightly, 'I was tired.'
+
+He next inquired where I was going and what I had had for dinner; and
+then, without the least transition, 'C'est bien,' he added, 'come along.'
+And he and his son, without another word, turned off to the next chestnut-
+tree but one, which they set to pruning.  The thing had passed of more
+simply than I hoped.  He was a grave, respectable man; and his unfriendly
+voice did not imply that he thought he was speaking to a criminal, but
+merely to an inferior.
+
+I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously
+occupied with a case of conscience.  Was I to pay for my night's lodging?
+I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there
+was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the
+morning.  I might have missed a train, had there been any in the
+neighbourhood to catch.  Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my
+entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar.
+
+The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended
+to the level of the river.  Here, in a place where many straight and
+prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded
+terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn.  It was
+marvellously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by
+magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for
+cleanliness.  To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me
+a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship.  To dabble
+among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the
+imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.  I went on with a light
+and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced.
+
+Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms.
+
+'Good,' thought I; 'here comes the waiter with the bill.'
+
+And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot.  Take it how you please,
+but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my
+tour.
+
+A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap,
+clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile.  A little girl
+followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake,
+while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the
+valley.  It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept
+enough, that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk.
+
+'Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?' he said at length.
+
+I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question
+with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest.
+
+'Ah,' said I, pointing upwards, 'I understand you now.  Yes, I know Him;
+He is the best of acquaintances.'
+
+The old man said he was delighted.  'Hold,' he added, striking his bosom;
+'it makes me happy here.'  There were a few who knew the Lord in these
+valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few.  'Many are called,'
+he quoted, 'and few chosen.'
+
+'My father,' said I, 'it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it is
+none of our business.  Protestants and Catholics, and even those who
+worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all.'
+
+I did not know I was so good a preacher.
+
+The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions
+of pleasure at meeting me.  'We are so few,' he said.  'They call us
+Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also
+a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor.'
+
+I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a
+member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the
+pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position.
+Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and
+especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient
+assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not
+completely in the right.  The truth is much talked about; but this old
+man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet, and friendly,
+that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert.  He was, as a
+matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother.  Of what that involves in the way of
+doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right
+well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of
+one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the
+same.  And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with
+me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a
+mistake of the truth-finding sort.  For charity begins blindfold; and
+only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a
+settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our
+fellow-men.  If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would
+willingly go on to deceive others.  And if ever at length, out of our
+separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common house,
+I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother
+will hasten to shake hands with me again.
+
+Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down
+upon a hamlet by the Tarn.  It was but a humble place, called La Vernede,
+with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll.  Here
+he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast.  The inn was kept
+by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a
+pretty and engaging girl.  The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak
+with the stranger.  And these were all Protestants--a fact which pleased
+me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more,
+they seemed all upright and simple people.  The Plymouth Brother hung
+round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice
+to make sure I was enjoying my meal.  His behaviour touched me deeply at
+the time, and even now moves me in recollection.  He feared to intrude,
+but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed
+never weary of shaking me by the hand.
+
+When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near
+half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly
+over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and
+old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still
+subsisting.  Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country
+plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his heart
+will doubtless be a fortunate young man.
+
+The valley below La Vernede pleased me more and more as I went forward.
+Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and
+walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and became
+green.  The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep; past a
+battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a church and
+parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of Cocures,
+sitting among vineyards, and meadows, and orchards thick with red apples,
+and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts from the
+roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets.  The hills,
+however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with cliffy
+battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn still
+rattled through the stones with a mountain noise.  I had been led, by
+bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country after
+the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and
+plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my
+Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the
+autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned
+into pale gold against the approach of winter.
+
+There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
+explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters.  Those who took
+to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and
+bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they would
+be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and
+supporting visions.  They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken;
+yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records.  With a light
+conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and
+circumstances.  The soul of Seguier, let us not forget, was like a
+garden.  They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no
+parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain
+of the cause, could never rest confident of the person.
+
+'We flew,' says one old Camisard, 'when we heard the sound of
+psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings.  We felt within us an animating
+ardour, a transporting desire.  The feeling cannot be expressed in words.
+It is a thing that must have been experienced to be understood.  However
+weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light so
+soon as the psalms fell upon our ears.'
+
+The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vernede not only
+explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which
+those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves
+to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of saints
+and peasants.
+
+
+
+FLORAC
+
+
+On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture, with
+an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a live
+fountain welling from the hill.  It is notable, besides, for handsome
+women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other, of the
+country of the Camisards.
+
+The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining cafe,
+where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon.  Every
+one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial map was
+fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among coffee-
+cups and glasses of liqueur.  Most of these kind advisers were
+Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled
+in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory
+still subsisted of the religious war.  Among the hills of the south-west,
+by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse,
+serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great
+persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded.
+But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these
+old doings have become an idle tale.  If you met a mixed company in the
+King's Arms at Wigton, it is not likely that the talk would run on
+Covenanters.  Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had
+not so much as heard of Prophet Peden.  But these Cevenols were proud of
+their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic;
+its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a race
+has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and pardon
+some prolixity of reference.  They told me the country was still full of
+legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's
+descendants--not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins
+or nephews--who were still prosperous people in the scene of the
+boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old
+combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century,
+in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren
+were peaceably ditching.
+
+Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit
+me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or
+two in talk.  Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and
+the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in
+politics.  You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a
+babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that
+the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an
+exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated.  Black
+Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon,
+Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all
+been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their
+hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy
+years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in mutual
+toleration and mild amity of life.  But the race of man, like that
+indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own;
+the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the
+rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens
+from the passions of a day.  We judge our ancestors from a more divine
+position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we can
+see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show of
+right.
+
+I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder
+than I thought.  I own I met these Protestants with a delight and a sense
+of coming home.  I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and
+deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French and
+English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals.  And hence I
+could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them
+more justly, than the Catholics.  Father Apollinaris may pair off with my
+mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask
+myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or,
+had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter
+of La Vernede.  With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but
+with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on
+selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange some
+honest thoughts.  In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even
+partial intimacies.  And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of
+our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without
+dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.
+
+
+
+IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE
+
+
+On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired
+donkey and tired donkey-driver.  A little way up the Tarnon, a covered
+bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente.  Steep rocky
+red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon the
+slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of millet or
+a few apple-trees studded with red apples; and the road passed hard by
+two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the heart of the
+tourist.
+
+It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment.  Even
+under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope,
+but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the hills
+descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather.  The sun
+had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was full of the
+lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks into the
+stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the roadway in an
+angle of the river.  Thither I descended, and, tying Modestine
+provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the neighbourhood.  A
+grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance
+grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other; and the darkness
+was rising steadily like an exhalation.  I approached a great oak which
+grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to my disgust the
+voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house round the angle
+on the other bank.  I had half a mind to pack and be gone again, but the
+growing darkness moved me to remain.  I had only to make no noise until
+the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call me early in the
+morning.  But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in such a great
+hotel.
+
+A hollow underneath the oak was my bed.  Before I had fed Modestine and
+arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
+others were beginning dimly to appear.  I slipped down to the river,
+which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with a
+good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
+near a house.  The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
+afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
+fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying.  The oak rose before
+me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
+in the face of the night.  No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
+the French happily put it, a la belle etoile.  He may know all their
+names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
+concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.  The
+greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
+themselves the most classical of poets.  These same far-away worlds,
+sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the
+sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words
+of the latter, they had 'no other tent but the sky, and no other bed than
+my mother earth.'
+
+All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell pattering
+over me from the oak.  Yet, on this first night of October, the air was
+as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back.
+
+I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more
+than any wolf.  A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the
+sense of duty.  If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and
+praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the
+domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress.  At the end of
+a fagging day, the sharp cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a keen
+annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary and
+respectable world in its most hostile form.  There is something of the
+clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and if he were not
+amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling afoot.  I
+respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway, or sleeping
+afield, I both detest and fear them.
+
+I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog--for
+I knew his bark--making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit
+up, retreating again with great alacrity.  The stars were not yet quite
+extinguished.  The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the
+early morn.  A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the
+hillside were outlined sharply against the sky.  The wind had veered more
+to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going on
+with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the hill-
+top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with gold.  In
+these high regions of the air, the sun was already shining as at noon.  If
+only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same thing all
+night long.  For it is always daylight in the fields of space.
+
+As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of the
+seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead in an
+almost contrary direction.  A few steps farther, and I saw a whole
+hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two
+peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and
+I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the
+kernel of our system.
+
+I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking
+wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that
+seems worthy of record.  For when I asked him if he were Protestant or
+Catholic--
+
+'Oh,' said he, 'I make no shame of my religion.  I am a Catholic.'
+
+He made no shame of it!  The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for
+it is the language of one in a minority.  I thought with a smile of
+Bavile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion
+for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction.
+Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant.  It is not a
+basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of
+horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts.  Outdoor
+rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
+plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution.  One who has grown a
+long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at night,
+a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the
+end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
+relations towards his God.  Like my mountain Plymouth Brother, he knows
+the Lord.  His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic; it is the
+poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history of his
+life.  God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared to
+this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the ground and
+essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds and dogmas by
+authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you
+will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
+adhere to them in good and evil.  He is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a
+Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a man is not a
+woman, or a woman not a man.  For he could not vary from his faith,
+unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and
+not a conventional meaning, change his mind.
+
+
+
+THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY
+
+
+I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the
+hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon in
+the clear air by many rocky peaks.  The road along the Mimente is yet
+new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first
+cart arrived at Cassagnas.  But although it lay thus apart from the
+current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the
+history of France.  Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the
+five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and
+arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves
+gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles.  To the
+same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were
+brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons,
+Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood.
+
+Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the
+oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas.  This
+was the band of Spirit Seguier; men who had joined their voices with his
+in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the
+Cevennes.  Seguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc,
+whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole army
+of the Camisards.  He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart, who
+admitted people to the sacrament or refused them, by 'intensively viewing
+every man' between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures off by
+rote.  And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August 1703, he
+lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible.  It is only strange that
+they were not surprised more often and more effectually; for this legion
+of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war, and camped
+without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God for whom
+they fought.  This is a token, not only of their faith, but of the
+trackless country where they harboured.  M. de Caladon, taking a stroll
+one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he might have
+walked into 'a flock of sheep in a plain,' and found some asleep and some
+awake and psalm-singing.  A traitor had need of no recommendation to
+insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond 'his faculty of singing
+psalms'; and even the prophet Salomon 'took him into a particular
+friendship.'  Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic troop
+subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but sacraments
+and ecstasies.
+
+People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been
+saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy
+than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of
+Rimmon.  When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, 'convinced by the
+uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than
+sympathy,' granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was
+still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day.  There is, indeed,
+one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic.  It is
+that of a Catholic cure in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a
+schoolmistress.  And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by
+the Protestant villagers.
+
+'It is a bad idea for a man,' said one, 'to go back from his
+engagements.'
+
+The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion,
+and were all plain and dignified in manner.  As a Protestant myself, I
+was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me further
+respect.  For we had something not unlike a religious controversy at
+table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being both strangers
+to the place, and Catholics.  The young men of the house stood round and
+supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly conducted, and
+surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and contentious
+differences of Scotland.  The merchant, indeed, grew a little warm, and
+was far less pleased than some others with my historical acquirements.
+But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all.
+
+'It's a bad idea for a man to change,' said he; and the remark was
+generally applauded.
+
+That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the
+Snows.  But this is a different race; and perhaps the same
+great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ
+in a kind spirit.  For courage respects courage; but where a faith has
+been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population.  The true
+work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they
+should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but
+that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect.
+
+The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous
+to sleep afield.
+
+'There are the wolves,' said he; 'and then it is known you are an
+Englishman.  The English have always long purses, and it might very well
+enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night.'
+
+I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate
+judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the
+arrangement of life.  Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky
+business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth
+regard.  'Something,' said I, 'might burst in your inside any day of the
+week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked into your room
+with three turns of the key.'
+
+'Cependant,' said he, 'coucher dehors!'
+
+'God,' said I, 'is everywhere.'
+
+'Cependant, coucher dehors!' he repeated, and his voice was eloquent of
+terror.
+
+He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so
+simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous.  Only one,
+on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my
+Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred
+sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy ale-house, 'Now I see that
+you know the Lord!'
+
+The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said I
+should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a
+note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus complied.
+
+A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path
+southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather.
+At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I
+left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road.
+
+I was now on the separation of two vast water-sheds; behind me all the
+streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was
+the basin of the Rhone.  Hence, as from the Lozere, you can see in clear
+weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the
+soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley
+Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England.  You may take this ridge
+as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five
+legions camped all round it and almost within view--Salomon and Joani to
+the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had finished
+his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which lasted all
+through October and November 1703, and during which four hundred and
+sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe, utterly
+subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth upon a
+silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land.  Time and man's activity have now
+repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed and sending up
+domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and leafy corners,
+many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is done, to his
+children and bright hearth.  And still it was perhaps the wildest view of
+all my journey.  Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging
+southward, channelled and sculptured by the winter streams, feathered
+from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there breaking out into a
+coronal of cliffs.  The sun, which was still far from setting, sent a
+drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the valleys were already
+plunged in a profound and quiet shadow.
+
+A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black
+cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed me
+to the road for St. Germain de Calberte.  There was something solemn in
+the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature.  Where he dwelt, how
+he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again, were
+more than I could fancy.  Not far off upon my right was the famous Plan
+de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the
+Camisards of Seguier.  This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of
+the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered
+ever since upon the mountains.  It might be news to him that Cavalier had
+surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an
+olive.  And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in
+broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two
+sticks.  I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once
+more, retraced my steps.
+
+Alas, it was a very commonplace affair.  The old gentleman had forgot to
+ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect.
+
+I told him sternly, 'Nothing.'
+
+'Nothing?' cried he.
+
+I repeated 'Nothing,' and made off.
+
+It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the
+old man as he had been to me.
+
+The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me
+in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very
+solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the
+trees.  But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless
+ballad not far off.  It seemed to be about love and a bel amoureux, her
+handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and
+answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like
+Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers.  What could I have told
+her?  Little enough; and yet all the heart requires.  How the world gives
+and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again
+into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden; and 'hope, which comes to all,' outwears the
+accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and
+death.  Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
+grateful to believe!
+
+We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless
+dust.  The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while
+upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I
+issued ourselves into her light.  I had emptied out my brandy at Florac,
+for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous
+and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon the
+road.  It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth
+unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury.  Even Modestine
+was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her
+little hoofs as to a livelier measure.  The road wound and descended
+swiftly among masses of chestnuts.  Hot dust rose from our feet and
+flowed away.  Our two shadows--mine deformed with the knapsack, hers
+comically bestridden by the pack--now lay before us clearly outlined on
+the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly
+distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds.  From time to time a
+warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling
+their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering
+music, and the shadows danced in tune.  And next moment the breeze had
+gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet.
+On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain
+were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone
+house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the
+huge field of sad nocturnal colouring.
+
+At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the
+moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great darkness,
+until another turning shot me without preparation into St. Germain de
+Calberte.  The place was asleep and silent, and buried in opaque night.
+Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon the road to
+show me that I was come among men's habitations.  The two last gossips of
+the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me to the inn.  The
+landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was already out, and
+had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an hour later, and I
+must have gone supperless to roost.
+
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+
+When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing of
+cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
+clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth on
+a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens.  It was still
+early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows
+encouraged me to be out and look round me.
+
+St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about.  At
+the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
+inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
+were Catholic; and it took the cure seventeen September days to go from
+house to house on horseback for a census.  But the place itself, although
+capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet.  It lies terraced
+across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts.  The Protestant
+chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town is the
+quaint old Catholic church.
+
+It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
+and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking to
+lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
+hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with two-
+and-fifty wounds, to be interred.  Clad in his priestly robes, he was
+laid out in state in the church.  The cure, taking his text from Second
+Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, 'And Amasa wallowed in his
+blood in the highway,' preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his
+brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious
+superior.  In the midst of this eloquence there came a breeze that Spirit
+Seguier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to their
+horses' heels, some east, some west, and the cure himself as far as
+Alais.
+
+Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a thimbleful
+of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood.  On the one hand, the
+legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the other, it was cut
+off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet.  The cure,
+Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's funeral, and
+so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated pulpit, and
+thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the Protestants.
+Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but was beaten back.
+The militiamen, on guard before the cure's door, could be heard, in the
+black hours, singing Protestant psalms and holding friendly talk with the
+insurgents.  And in the morning, although not a shot had been fired,
+there would not be a round of powder in their flasks.  Where was it gone?
+All handed over to the Camisards for a consideration.  Untrusty guardians
+for an isolated priest!
+
+That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte, the
+imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse of
+human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the mountains.
+Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of lion-hunters; and
+people turned round to have a second look, or came out of their houses,
+as I went by.  My passage was the first event, you would have fancied,
+since the Camisards.  There was nothing rude or forward in this
+observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that of
+oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove me
+from the street.
+
+I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with
+sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of the
+chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves.  Ever and again a
+little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light and
+dull sound, upon the sward.  The noise was as of a thin fall of great
+hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of an
+approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains.  Looking up, I
+could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already
+gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill,
+sunlit and green with leaves.
+
+I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply.  I moved in an atmosphere
+of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content.  But perhaps it was
+not the place alone that so disposed my spirit.  Perhaps some one was
+thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had
+come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good.  For some thoughts, which
+sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan their
+features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways, should but
+ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go again for
+ever.  Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings?  Who shall
+say?  But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace and
+pleasure in our hearts.
+
+I dined with a pair of Catholics.  They agreed in the condemnation of a
+young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over to
+the religion of his wife.  A Protestant born they could understand and
+respect; indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman,
+who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects,
+save that 'wrong was more wrong for the Catholic,' who had more light and
+guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt.
+
+'It is a bad idea for a man to change,' said one.
+
+It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and
+for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts.  I
+have some difficulty in imagining a better.  It's not only a great flight
+of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for
+heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with all
+this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a
+hairbreadth to the eyes of God.  Honour to those who do so, for the
+wrench is sore.  But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or
+weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a
+sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who
+can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind.  And I think I
+should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other
+words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
+find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions.
+
+The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at
+dinner a more economical juice of the grape--La Parisienne, they call it.
+It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by one
+the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is supplied
+at night in water: so, with ever another pitcher from the well, and ever
+another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask of
+Parisienne may last a family till spring.  It is, as the reader will
+anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste.
+
+What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St.
+Germain de Calberte.  I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great
+glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vallee
+Francaise, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards
+evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre.  It was a long and steep
+ascent.  Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept
+hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me.  The driver, like
+the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he
+was sure of what I had to sell.  He had noticed the blue wool which hung
+out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my
+power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue-wool collars, such as
+decorate the neck of the French draught-horse.
+
+I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired to
+see the view upon the other side before the day had faded.  But it was
+night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and
+only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west.  A yawning
+valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my
+feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky.  There was
+Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet.  And Castanet, not only as an
+active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for
+there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a
+public tragedy, love will have its way.  In the high tide of war he
+married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called
+Mariette.  There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released five-
+and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event.  Seven months
+afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her in
+derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like to
+have gone hard with her.  But Castanet was a man of execution, and loved
+his wife.  He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a hostage;
+and for the first and last time in that war there was an exchange of
+prisoners.  Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon Mount
+Aigoal, has left descendants to this day.
+
+Modestine and I--it was our last meal together--had a snack upon the top
+of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the moonlight
+and decorously eating bread out of my hand.  The poor brute would eat
+more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection for me,
+which I was soon to betray.
+
+It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a
+carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished
+lantern.
+
+Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a
+stiff hill in little beyond six hours!
+
+
+
+FAREWELL, MODESTINE!
+
+
+On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced
+unfit for travel.  She would need at least two days' repose, according to
+the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and, being
+in a civilised country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my lady
+friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon.  Our yesterday's
+march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long
+hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's
+capabilities.  Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivalled
+opportunity.  Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before
+noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for five-
+and-thirty.  The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought freedom
+into the bargain.
+
+St Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant.  The maire, a
+Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself
+characteristic of the country.  The young women of the Cevennes profit by
+the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as
+governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet,
+struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London.
+I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me as
+being excellent.
+
+One thing more I note.  The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this
+neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the
+river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press.  I could not at
+first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain.
+
+'Making cider,' he said.  'Oui, c'est comme ca.  Comme dans le nord!'
+
+There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the
+devil.
+
+It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through
+a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement.
+I had lost Modestine.  Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but
+now she was gone,
+
+         'And oh!
+   The difference to me!'
+
+For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of
+a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and
+jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road.
+After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner,
+I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to
+regard me as a god.  She loved to eat out of my hand.  She was patient,
+elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small.  Her
+faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own.
+Farewell, and if for ever--
+
+Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn,
+I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver
+and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my
+emotion.
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Travels with a Donkey
+
+
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