my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of
carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey. For
more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of
Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a
considerable quantity of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for
myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the destinations were
reversed.

Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in
threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the
nocturnal practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my
attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left
out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before
telling my own mishaps, let me, in two words, relate the lesson of my
experience. If the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full
length--not doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the
traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the
imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend
to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a man soon
learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a
well-adjusted stone.

On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we
began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after my hopes were in the
dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I
returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that
the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on
and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it
would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads;
and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a
deal of freedom.

I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a _barde_, as they call it--fitted
upon Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled
sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my
waistcoat), a great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing
the white bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together
in a very elaborate system of knots, and I looked on the result with
fatuous content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the
donkey's shoulders, with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new
pack-saddle that had not yet bee