I
have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate
adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be
found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing
north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon
the earth, an inland castaway--was to find a fraction of my daydreams
realized. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with
a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it
broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale.
All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the
perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the
rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the
birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and
shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an
axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild
weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful
of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to
disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had
made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the
threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before
the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud
mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.

The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I
buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind
with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more
in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had
escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight
of me, with hands upraised in horror.

"My poor boy!" he cried, "what does this mean?"

I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a
mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the
man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.

"This time, at least," said he, "there shall be no mistake."

And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile,
and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had
hunted for so long.

CHEYLARD AND LUC

Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken
ends of village, with no particular st