ffect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting
I couldn't have said what momentous young dream. I might have been
_right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if I had
uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "I told
you so, I told you so!" What I had told myself was of course that the
impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most
insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but I had had
before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the
very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I
ever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a social
charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all events, this
mystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, I
helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. It counted all
immensely for practice in taking in.

I profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that
has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely
determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way
from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a
village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura,
where we were to spend the night. I was stretched at my ease on a couch
formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress
and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever,
which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our little
band, these invidious luxuries. It may have been that as my body was
pampered so I was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my
appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the
first--by which I mean from the moment of our getting under way, that
morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old Hotel de
l'Univers at Lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my
good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps
somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was
afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the
ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court,
of the French scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such,
in particular, had prepared me not a little, when I should in due course
hear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de prov