n, blinking confusedly, with an alarmed
conscience.

"You remind me of a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one
hears you always--tic-tic, tic-tic."

"Oh, I see," said Singleton, beaming ingenuously. "I am very equable."

"You are very equable, yes. And do you find it pleasant to be equable?"

Singleton turned and grinned more brightly, while he sucked the water
from his camel's-hair brush. Then, with a quickened sense of his
indebtedness to a Providence that had endowed him with intrinsic
facilities, "Oh, delightful!" he exclaimed.

Roderick stood looking at him a moment. "Damnation!" he said at last,
solemnly, and turned his back.

One morning, shortly after this, Rowland and Roderick took a long walk.
They had walked before in a dozen different directions, but they had not
yet crossed a charming little wooded pass, which shut in their valley
on one side and descended into the vale of Engelberg. In coming from
Lucerne they had approached their inn by this path, and, feeling that
they knew it, had hitherto neglected it in favor of untrodden ways. But
at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk
to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a
huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley
and complicates its picturesqueness with an element rare in Swiss
scenery. Hard by is a group of chalets and inns, with the usual
appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort--lean brown guides in baggy
homespun, lounging under carved wooden galleries, stacks of alpenstocks
in every doorway, sun-scorched Englishmen without shirt-collars. Our two
friends sat a while at the door of an inn, discussing a pint of wine,
and then Roderick, who was indefatigable, announced his intention of
climbing to a certain rocky pinnacle which overhung the valley, and,
according to the testimony of one of the guides, commanded a view of the
Lake of Lucerne. To go and come back was only a matter of an hour, but
Rowland, with the prospect of his homeward trudge before him, confessed
to a preference for lounging on his bench, or at most strolling a trifle
farther and taking a look at the monastery. Roderick went off alone, and
his companion after a while bent his steps to the monasterial church. It
was remarkable, like most of the churches of Catholic Switzerland, for
a hideous style of devotional ornament; but it had a certain cold and
musty picturesqueness, and Rowla