t 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, gr