er how to
speak English, nor to draw, nor yet to dance, it would not in the
least have diminished the esteem with which he honoured her. The main
essential in his eyes was that she was benevolent to the poor, and that
she cherished a little tenderness for heroes.

When he had learned, with an air of indifference, all that he cared to
learn, he respectfully bowed himself away from Mlle. Moiseney, to whom
he had not mentioned his name, and, buckling his haversack, he put it on
his back, paid his bill, and set out on foot to make a hasty ascent of
the culminating point of the Albula Pass, which leads into the Engadine
Valley. One would have difficulty in finding throughout the Alps a
more completely barren, rugged, desolate spot, than this portion of
the Albula Pass. The highway lies among masses of rocks, heaped up in
terrible disorder. Arrived at the culminating point, Count Abel felt the
necessity of taking breath. He clambered up a little hillock, where he
seated himself. At his feet were wide open the yawning jaws of a cavern,
obstructed by great tufts of aconite (wolf's-bane), with sombre foliage;
one would have said that they kept guard over some crime in which they
had been accomplices. Count Abel contemplated the awful silence that
surrounded him; everywhere enormous boulders, heaped together, or
scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides,
others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air.
It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games
of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or
jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads. It is
most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and
confused by the hideous aspect of his work, did justice to it by
breaking it into fragments with his gigantic hammer.

Count Abel heard a tinkling of bells, and, looking up, he saw
approaching a post-chaise, making its way from Engadine to Bergun. It
was a large, uncovered berlin, and in it sat a woman of about sixty
years of age, accompanied by her attendants and her pug-dog. This woman
had rather a bulky head, a long face, a snub-nose, high cheek-bones, a
keen, bright eye, a large mouth, about which played a smile, at the
same time _spirituel_, imperious, and contemptuous. Abel grew pale, and
became at once convulsed with terror; he could not withdraw his eyes
from this markedly Mongolian physiognomy, which from af