strictures. Without going so far as the old King Louis-Philippe, who
used to say in his exile, "The people are never in fault"--one may admit
that there must be some righteousness in the assent of a whole village.
Mad! Mad! He who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by
the well of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by
the fat, sly rogue of a landlord has come very near perfection. He
rides forth, his head encircled by a halo--the patron saint of all lives
spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was
not a good citizen.

Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered
exclamation of my tutor.

It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have had a
jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterward, jolly enough in a
way and not altogether without their lesson, but this year of which
I speak was the year of my last school-boy holiday. There are other
reasons why I should remember that year, but they are too long to state
formally in this place. Moreover, they have nothing to do with that
holiday. What has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which
the remark was made we had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the
Falls of the Rhine, the Lake of Constance,--in fact, it was a memorable
holiday of travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of
the Reuss. It was a delightful time. It was much more like a stroll than
a tramp. Landing from a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluelen, we found
ourselves at the end of the second day, with the dusk overtaking our
leisurely footsteps, a little way beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day
on which the remark was made: in the shadows of the deep valley and with
the habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not upon
the ethics of conduct, but upon the simpler human problem of shelter
and food. There did not seem anything of the kind in sight, and we were
thinking of turning back when suddenly, at a bend of the road, we came
upon a building, ghostly in the twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and that
magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the
unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very roots of the
mountains. It was long, though not big at all; it was low; it was built
of boards, without ornamentation, in barrack-hut style, with the white
window-frames quite flush with the yellow face