e with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death
in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the nocturnal
practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my attention. Yet
in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left out. Like
Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before telling my
own mishaps, let me in two words relate the lesson of my experience. If
the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full length--not
doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe.
The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the imperfection of our
transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend to overset; but there
are stones on every roadside, and a man soon learns the art of correcting
any tendency to overbalance with a well-adjusted stone.

On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we began
to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the dust. The
pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I returned it
to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street
outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and
listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be
more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at
any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a deal of
freedom.

I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a barde, as they call it--fitted upon
Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled sack,
my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my waistcoat), a
great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing the white bread,
the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together in a very elaborate
system of knots, and I looked on the result with fatuous content. In
such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the donkey's shoulders,
with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new pack-saddle that had not
yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened with brand-new girths that
might be expected to stretch and slacken by the way, even a very careless
traveller should have seen disaster brewing. That elaborate system of
knots, again, was the work of too many sympathisers to be very artfully
designed. It is true they tightened the cords with a will; as many as
three at a time would have a foot against Modestine's quarters, and be
hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned a