Now, I Think Of It, It Would Be A Great Waste Of Time.
Here am I no
farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have already
admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of a
man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and
straightforward narrative of fact.
I will therefore postpone the Story
of the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the
barren hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of
Tuscany, or in some other place where a little padding will do neither
you nor me any great harm.
On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going to give you any kind
of description of this intolerable day's march. If you want some kind
of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little chalets which
were beginning and make what you can of them.
LECTOR. Where are they?
AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here. They were
overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road leaves the
valley and makes over a little pass for a place called Schangnau. But
though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact incident and the
truth - a thing that I would swear to in the court of justice, or quite
willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it to me; or even
take as historical if I found it in a modern English history of the
Anglo-Saxon Church - though, I repeat, it is a thing actually lived,
yet I will tell it you.
It was at the very end of the road, and when an enormous weariness had
begun to add some kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the
dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving a cart very
rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but he said to me
some words in German which I did not understand. We were at that
moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road, and
the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while
he went in and drank.
How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless
you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses'
heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the
more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind
of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
for no less a person than a 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 85 of 189
Words from 43786 to 44316
of 97758
