ught to deck the animal my fancy had painted. Everything I
bought at Bern shall go, if I have to dig a grave by night in which to
bury them. This is a vow, and though my heart be wrung, I'll keep it."

Molly listened to this outburst as gravely as if I had been
threatening to sacrifice a son, did not some incredible good fortune
supply a ram caught by his horns in the bushes.

For Piedimulera we left in the afternoon, somewhat buoyed up by the
omen of the name. The way led back towards the Alps, up a broad and
beautiful valley strewn with evidences of the works for the Simplon
railway: embankments, bridges, quarries, and occasional groups of
workmen hauling rhythmically on the many ropes of a pile-driver.
Presently we swerved from the main road, and crossed the valley bed,
obedient to the map, which was our only guide to Piedimulera. We
passed one or two romantically placed, ancient villages, each of which
I hoped might be our goal; but, as usual in life, the town for which
we were bound did not appear as alluring as other towns, where we had
no need to stop.

"I feel there will be not so much as the ghost of a long-perished
Roman mule in this hamlet," I said despondently, hoping that Molly
would contradict me. But she, too, looked anxious, now that the great
moment had come, for we were driving into a town, at the mouth of a
deep gorge already dusky with purpling shadows, and there was no doubt
that it was Piedimulera.

The gloom of the twilight settled upon our spirits, dissimulate as we
might, as the car swept into the cobble-paved courtyard of an
_albergo_, a venerable grandfather of a hostelry, old, grim, and
forbidding. Out came a large, fair man to welcome us, with calculation
in his cold grey eye. He looked to me like a spider in his web,
greeting some inviting flies. We broke the ice by asking for coffee,
and when we were told that we must have it without milk, as there were
no cows within a radius of many miles, I would have staked all my
possessions (especially those acquired at Bern) that there would be no
such comparatively useless animals as mules or donkeys.

Instinct is seldom wrong. If ever there was nothing in a name, there
was nothing in that of Piedimulera, which had evidently been applied
in sheer mockery, or because, untold generations ago, the foot of that
rare creature, a mule, had been preserved here in a museum. When the
landlord found that we did not intend to stop overnight, unless mules