through the corn, thus
turning the flank of the _sapin_ and its attendants. Our driver
submitted to this act of violence much as a member of the Society of
Friends allows a chamberlain to remove his hat from behind when he is
favoured with an audience of the sovereign; and when we regained the
high road, he meekly took up the reins and drove us at a good pace to
Arc.

The village lies in a curiously open plain, with a girdle of hills, in
one of which the glacieres were supposed to lie. The first _auberge_
refused us admittance, on the ground that the dinner was all
pre-engaged, and the result was that we found a pleasanter place higher
up the village, near a vast new _maison de ville_ with every window
shattered by recent hail. The people groaned over the unnecessary
expense of this huge building, which might well, from its size, have
been a home for the whole village; and they told us that the communal
forests had been terribly over-cut to provide the money for it. Our
first demand was for food; our next, for a guide to the glacieres. Food
we could have; but why _should_ we wish to go to the glacieres, when
there was so much else worth seeing at a little distance?--a guide might
without doubt be found, but there was nothing to be seen when we got
there. We ordered prompt dinner, anything that happened to be ready, and
desired the landlord to look out for a man to show us the way up the
hills. When the dinner came, it was cold; and the main dish consisted
apparently of something which had made stock for many generations of
soup, and had then been kept in a half-warm state, ready to be heated
for any passer-by who called for hot meat, till the cook had despaired
of its ever being used, and had allowed it to become cold: at least, no
other supposition seemed to account for its utter want of flavour, and
the wonderful development of its fibres. As a matter of politeness, I
asked the man what it was; when he took the dish from the table, smelled
at it, and pronounced it veal.

There were also several specimens of the original old turnip-radish,
with large shrubs of heads, and mature feelers many inches long. As all
this was not very inviting, we ordered an omelette and some cheese; and
when the omelette came, we found that the cook had combined our ideas
and understood our order to mean a cheese-omelette, which was not so bad
after all.

By this time, the landlord's visit to his drinking-room had procured a
man willing