ncipal.

When I had been in Aix-les-Bains before, I had made the excursion to
Mont Revard, as all the world makes it, by the funicular railway; and
after half an hour in the little train, I had arrived at the top for
lunch and the view, both being enjoyed in a conventional manner. Now,
all was to be changed. The Boy and I did not regard ourselves as
tourists, but as pilgrims.

Among other things that self-respecting pilgrims cannot do, is to
ascend a mountain by means of a funicular railway; better stay at the
bottom, and look up with reverence. Therefore, instead of strolling
out to the little station about twelve o'clock, with the view of
reaching the restaurant on the plateau in time for _dejeuner_, we met
on the balcony of the Bristol at seven in the morning. There we
fortified ourselves for a long walk, with eggs and _cafe au lait_,
while Innocentina and Joseph grouped the animals at the foot of the
steps.

The day was divinely young, and most divinely fair, when we set forth.
Only the soft fall of an occasional leaf, weary of keeping up
appearances on no visible means of support, told that autumn had
come. The weather put me in mind of a beautiful woman of forty, who
can still cheat the world into believing that she is in the full
summer of her prime, and is making the most of the few good years left
before the crash.

As we struck up the steep hill that leads out of Aix-les-Bains and
civilisation, passing with all our little procession into the oak
copses which fringe the lower slopes of Mont Revard, the Boy and I
agreed that nothing became the town so well as the leaving it behind.
At last little Aix unveiled her face to us, as we looked down upon it
from airy altitudes. We had space to see how pretty she was, how
charmingly she was dressed, and how gracefully she sat in her
mountain-backed chair, with her dainty white feet in the lake, which,
as Joseph said, we could now follow with our eyes _dans toute son
etendue_. A beautiful _etendue_ it was, the water keeping its
extraordinary brilliance of colour, even in the far distance; vivid in
changing blue-greens, flecked with gold, like the spread tail of a
peacock burnished by the sun.

Mont Revard is chiselled on the same pattern as all the other
mountains, big and little, of this part of Savoie; first, the long,
steep slope decently covered with a belt of wood, oak below, and pine
above; then a grey, precipitous wall, scarred and furrowed by the
frost an