egins
with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for
miles.

Before it was dark--indeed one could still read--I saw a group of
houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass
them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first,
saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep
here.'

There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they
were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like
Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said,
'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make
me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I
dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me,
and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to
stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and
wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It
was not yet dark.

By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near
at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late.
The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no
trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling
torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on
the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now
quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the
half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of
the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which
hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind--I felt it
growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered me. The occasional steeps
beside the road, one especially beneath a high bridge where a
tributary falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They were
like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being now dark, and I having
long since entered the upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as
high as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the fog, just off
the road, through pine-trees. It was time. I could not have gone much
farther.

To this I turned and found there one of those new hotels, not very
large, but very expensive. They knew me at once for what I was, and
welcomed me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a fine warm bed,
told me I was the first that had yet stopped there that year, and left
me to