A little higher, and I passed a pair of
men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music
of a bourree.
Still further, and when I was already threading the
birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along
with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive air
from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself some grizzled,
apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in the
clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled
my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once
past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of
the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds
and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended here; and this
was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful.
There are other degrees of feyness, as of punishment, besides the
capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I
relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so
widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and
struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher
level. It was my one serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of
my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I
had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse
flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn.
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