take the waters.

They sat facing me, on the opposite side of the table; and I at once
noticed that the father had a very singular, nervous twitching.

Every time he wanted to reach an object, his hand described a sort of
zigzag before it succeeded in reaching what it was in search of, and
after a little while this movement annoyed me so that I turned aside my
head in order not to see it.

I noticed, too, that the young girl, during meals, wore a glove on her
left hand.

After dinner I went for a stroll in the park of the bathing
establishment. This led toward the little Auvergnese station of
Chatel-Guyon, hidden in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from
which flowed so many boiling springs, arising from the deep bed of
extinct volcanoes. Over yonder, above our heads, the domes of extinct
craters lifted their ragged peaks above the rest in the long mountain
chain. For Chatel-Guyon is situated at the entrance to the land of
mountain domes.

Beyond it stretches out the region of peaks, and, farther on again the
region of precipitous summits.

The "Puy de Dome" is the highest of the domes, the Peak of Sancy is
the loftiest of the peaks, and Cantal is the most precipitous of these
mountain heights.

It was a very warm evening, and I was walking up and down a shady path,
listening to the opening, strains of the Casino band, which was playing
on an elevation overlooking the park.

And I saw the father and the daughter advancing slowly in my direction.
I bowed as one bows to one's hotel companions at a watering place; and
the man, coming to a sudden halt, said to me:

"Could you not, monsieur, tell us of a nice walk to take, short, pretty,
and not steep; and pardon my troubling you?"

I offered to show them the way toward the valley through which the
little river flowed, a deep valley forming a gorge between two tall,
craggy, wooded slopes.

They gladly accepted my offer.

And we talked, naturally, about the virtue of the waters.

"Oh," he said, "my daughter has a strange malady, the seat of which is
unknown. She suffers from incomprehensible nervous attacks. At one time
the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time
they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they
declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady,
that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is
attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regula