here with not a
cloud, and the grand plateau on the very summit of Mont Blanc so clear
by day and night that it was difficult to believe in intervening chasms
and precipices, and almost impossible to resist the idea that one might
sally forth and climb up easily. I went into all sorts of places; armed
with a great pole with a spike at the end of it, like a leaping-pole,
and with pointed irons buckled on to my shoes; and am all but knocked
up. I was very anxious to make the expedition to what is called 'The
Garden:' a green spot covered with wild flowers, lying across the Mer de
Glace, and among the most awful mountains: but I could find no
Englishman at the hotels who was similarly disposed, and the Brave
_wouldn't go_. No sir! He gave in point blank (having been horribly
blown in a climbing excursion the day before), and couldn't stand it. He
is too heavy for such work, unquestionably.[122] In all other respects,
I think he has exceeded himself on this journey; and if you could have
seen him riding a very small mule, up a road exactly like the broken
stairs of Rochester-castle; with a brandy bottle slung over his
shoulder, a small pie in his hat, a roast fowl looking out of his
pocket, and a mountain staff of six feet long carried cross-wise on the
saddle before him; you'd have said so. He was (next to me) the
admiration of Chamounix, but he utterly quenched me on the road."

On the road as they returned there had been a small adventure, the day
before this letter was written. Dickens was jingling slowly up the Tete
Noire pass (his mule having thirty-seven bells on its head), riding at
the moment quite alone, when--"an Englishman came bolting out of a
little chalet in a most inaccessible and extraordinary place, and said
with great glee 'There has been an accident here sir!' I had been
thinking of anything else you please; and, having no reason to suppose
him an Englishman except his language, which went for nothing in the
confusion, stammered out a reply in French and stared at him, in a very
damp shirt and trowsers, as he stared at me in a similar costume. On his
repeating the announcement, I began to have a glimmering of common
sense; and so arrived at a knowledge of the fact that a German lady had
been thrown from her mule and had broken her leg, at a short distance
off, and had found her way in great pain to that cottage, where the
Englishman, a Prussian, and a Frenchman, had presently come up; and the
Frenchman,