stentatiously declares himself to be omniscient and
infallible. Nobody takes him at his word, or supposes that the editor of
"Punch" is really the most conceited man in all England. But we poor
mountaineers are occasionally fixed with our own careless talk by some
outsider who is not in the secret. We know ourselves to be a small sect,
and to be often laughed at; we reply by: assuming that we are the salt
of the earth, and that our amusement is the first and noblest of all
amusements. Our only retort to the good-humoured ridicule with which we
are occasionally treated is to adopt an affected strut, and to carry it
off as if we were the finest fellows in the world. We make a boast of
our shame, and say, if you laugh we must crow. But we don't really mean
anything: if we did, the only word which the English language would
afford wherewith to describe us would be the very unpleasant antithesis
to wise men, and certainly I hold that we have the average amount of
common sense. When, therefore, I see us taken to task for swaggering, I
think it a trifle hard that this merely playful affectation of
superiority should be made a serious fault. For the future I would
promise to be careful, if it were worth avoiding the misunderstanding of
men who won't take a joke. Meanwhile, I can only state that when Alpine
travellers indulge in a little swagger about their own performances and
other people's incapacity, they don't mean more than an infinitesimal
fraction of what they say, and that they know perfectly well that when
history comes to pronounce a final judgment upon the men of the time, it
won't put mountain-climbing on a level with patriotism, or even with
excellence in the fine arts.

The reproach of real _bona fide_ arrogance is, so far as I know, very
little true of Alpine travellers. With the exception of the necessary
fringe hanging on to every set of human beings--consisting of persons
whose heads are weaker than their legs--the mountaineer, so far as my
experience has gone, is generally modest enough. Perhaps he sometimes
flaunts his ice-axes and ropes a little too much before the public eye
at Chamonix, as a yachtsman occasionally flourishes his nautical costume
at Cowes; but the fault may be pardoned by those not inexorable to human
weaknesses. This opinion, I know, cuts at the root of the most popular
theory as to our ruling passion. If we do not climb the Alps to gain
notoriety, for what purpose can we possibly climb th