trels with pitiful
faces, and long overcoats flapping their legs, who infest the Swiss
hostelries, had just arrived with their instruments.

At the very first notes our man sprang up as if galvanized.

"_Zou!_ bravo!.. forward, music!"

And off he went, opening the great doors, feting the musicians, soaking
them with champagne, drunk himself without drinking a drop, solely with
the music which brought him back to life. He mimicked the piston, he
mimicked the harp, he snapped his fingers over his head, and rolled his
eyes and danced his steps, to the utter stupefaction of the tourists
running in from all sides at the racket. Then suddenly, as the
exhilarated musicos struck up a Strauss waltz with the fury of true
tziganes, the Alpinist, perceiving in the doorway the wife of Professor
Schwanthaler, a rotund little Viennese with mischievous eyes, still
youthful in spite of her powdered gray hair, he sprang up her, caught
her by the waist, and whirled her into the room, crying put to the
others; "Come on! come on! let us waltz!"

The impetus was given, the hotel thawed and twirled, carried off its
centre. People danced in the vestibule, in the salon, round the long
green table of the reading-room. 'Twas that devil of a man who set fire
to ice. He, however, danced no more, being out of breath at the end of
a couple of turns; but he guided his ball, urged the musicians, coupled
the dancers, cast into the arms of the Bonn professor an elderly
Englishwoman; and into those of the austere Astier-Rehu the friskiest
of the Peruvian damsels. Resistance was impossible. From that terrible
Alpinist issued I know not what mysterious aura which lightened and
buoyed up every one. And _zou! zou! zou!_ No more contempt and disdain.
Neither Rice nor Prunes, only waltzers. Presently the madness spread;
it reached the upper storeys, and up through the well of the staircase
could be seen to the sixth-floor landing the heavy and high-coloured
skirts of the Swiss maids on duty, twirling with the stiffness of
automatons before a musical chalet.

Ah! the wind may blow without and shake the lamp-posts, make the
telegraph wires groan, and whirl the snow in spirals across that
desolate summit Within all are warm, all are comforted, and remain so
for that one night.

"_Differemment_, I must go to bed, myself," thought the worthy Alpinist,
a prudent man, coming from a country where every one packs and unpacks
himself rapidly. Laughing in his griz