General of Division, who gave me a franc
for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
course, expected him to bring in his own hands.
Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
that you find there.
Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
held this horse.
