to pick up an adventure in the
zoological line; for he had on a pair of high, stout boots, and he
carried a stick in his hand, which was forked at one extremity, so as to
be very convenient to hold down a crotalus with, if he should happen to
encounter one. He knew the aspect of the ledge from a distance; for its
bald and leprous-looking declivities stood out in their nakedness from
the wooded sides of The Mountain, when this was viewed from certain
points of the village. But the nearer aspect of the blasted region had
something frightful in it. The cliffs were water-worn, as if they had
been gnawed for thousands of years by hungry waves. In some places they
overhung their base so as to look like leaning towers which might topple
over at any minute. In other parts they were scooped into niches or
caverns. Here and there they were cracked in deep fissures, some of them
of such width that one might enter them, if he cared to run the risk of
meeting the regular tenants, who might treat him as an intruder.

Parts of the ledge were cloven perpendicularly, with nothing but cracks
or slightly projecting edges in which or on which a foot could find hold.
High up on one of these precipitous walls of rock he saw some tufts of
flowers, and knew them at once for the same that he had found between the
leaves of his Virgil. Not there, surely! No woman would have clung
against that steep, rough parapet to gather an idle blossom. And yet the
master looked round everywhere, and even up the side of that rock, to see
if there were no signs of a woman's footstep. He peered about curiously,
as if his eye might fall on some of those fragments of dress which women
leave after them, whenever they run against each other or against
anything else,--in crowded ballrooms, in the brushwood after picnics, on
the fences after rambles, scattered round over every place which has
witnessed an act of violence, where rude hands have been laid upon them.
Nothing--Stop, though, one moment. That stone is smooth and polished,
as if it had been somewhat worn by the pressure of human feet. There is
one twig broken among the stems of that clump of shrubs. He put his foot
upon the stone and took hold of the close-clinging shrub. In this way he
turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on a natural platform,
which lay in front of one of the wider fissures,--whether the mouth of a
cavern or not he could not yet tell. A flat stone made an easy sea