Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.
Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses -
_Ave Crux Spes Unica._
I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
looked backward along the road I had come.
There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent.
