?"

He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasing
the dying words of certain noble lips,--

"Be good, Monsieur; be good."

JACK AND JILL

My friend, Monsieur ----, absolutely declines to append his name to these
pages, of which he is the virtual author. Nevertheless, he permits me to
publish them anonymously, being, indeed, a little curious to ascertain
what would have been the public verdict as to his sanity, had he given
his personal imprimatur to a narrative on the face of it so incredible.

"How!" he says. "Should I have believed it of another, when I have such
astonishing difficulty at this date in realizing that it was I--yes, I,
my friend--this same little callow _poupon_--that was an actual hero of
the adventure? Fidele" (by which term we cover the identity of his
wife)--"Fidele will laugh in my face sometimes, crying, 'Not thou, little
cabbage, nor yet thy faithful, was it that dived through half the world
and came up breathless! No, no--I cannot believe it. We folk, so
matter-of-fact and so comical. It was of Hansel and Gretel we had been
reading hand-in-hand, till we fell asleep in the twilight and fancied
this thing.' And then she will trill like a bird at the thought of how
solemn Herr Grabenstock, of the Hotel du Mont Blanc, would have stared
and edged apart, had we truly recounted to him that which had befallen us
between the rising and the setting of a sun. We go forth; it rains--my
faith! as it will in the Chamounix valley--and we return in the evening
sopped. Very natural. But, for a first cause of our wetting. Ah! there we
must be fastidious of an explanation, or we shall find ourselves in peril
of restraint.

"Now, write this for me, and believe it if you can. We are not in a
conspiracy of imagination--I and the dear courageous."

Therefore I _do_ write it, speaking in the person of Monsieur ----, and
largely from his dictation; and my friend shall amuse himself over the
nature of its reception.

* * * * *

"One morning (it was in late May)," says Monsieur ----, "my Fidele and I
left the Hotel du Mont Blanc for a ramble amongst the hills. We were a
little adventurous, because we were innocent. We took no guide but our
commonsense; and that served us very ill--or very well, according to the
point of view. Ours was that of the birds, singing to the sky and
careless of the snake in the grass so long as they can pipe their tune.