the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'
after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly
good red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.

Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she gave me a quantity of
small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I found to contain one
Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. This I held up
angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is hard to deal
with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse
which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his
now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian
twaddle of accents I intoned to her--and so left her astounded to
repentance or to shame.

Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing over running water put
myself out of her power.

The wood went up darkly and the path branched here and there so that I
was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally what seemed to
me the most southerly course, and so came at last up steeply through a
dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.

Just as I came to the end of the rise, after perhaps an hour, perhaps
two, of that great curtain of forest which had held the mountain side,
the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, and then the path
was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very top of the Jura and
the coping of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. I had
crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning out of my way.

It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a moment to breathe
and look about me.

It was evident that nothing higher remained, for though a new line of
wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing appeared above
them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. I
approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence of
post and rails bounding it, and as I was looking for the entry of a
path (for my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp
grass of the little down) there came to me one of those great
revelations which betray to us suddenly the higher things and stand
afterwards firm in our minds.

There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the
ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.

What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I
am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.

I saw between