bases,
clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
distant edges of all caught the morning.

At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
neighbouring sources of the river.

I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.

So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
the hills. Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines
Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special
commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the
older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some
strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor
these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what
they lack in multitudinous life.

I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses
the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
seeing in front of me a village called