ntains, and dreaming of the
sky. On most of the walls were votive offerings in the shape of
pictures, sent to the monks by grateful visitors in far-off countries.
One was an engraving which had adorned the nursery in my youth, and
had been a never-failing source of curiosity to me. It was Gustave
Dore's "Christian Martyrs," and I had once been deprived of pudding at
the nursery dinner, because I had remarked (with irreverence wholly
unintentional) that one of the lions seemed ill, and anxious to "climb
up the wall and get away from the nasty martyrs." Thus it is that
children are misunderstood by their elders! and now, as I gazed at the
same picture on the monastery wall, I felt again all the old, impotent
rebellion against injustice and misplaced power.

Later, I wandered through the pathetically interesting Alpine garden,
carefully kept by the monks; and then, sure that by this time the Brat
and his cavalcade must be far on their way, I started, with Joseph and
Finois, to stroll down the Pass towards Aosta.

I had promised Jack and Molly to tell them in my letters, whether it
would be possible for them, with a motor, to go by some of the routes
which I chose. Over the St. Bernard from Martigny to the Hospice they
could not have ventured, even in the stealthy, fly-by-night manner in
which they had "done" the St. Gothard and the Simplon; for on the St.
Bernard the road was always narrow, often stony and dangerous. Beyond,
on the other side, even carriages cannot yet pass, descending to
Aosta, though in another year the new road will be finished. As it is,
for many a generation pilgrims from the Hospice to Italy have been
obliged to go down as far as the mountain village of St. Rhemy either
on foot or mule-back; thus there was no hope for Mercedes there.

I went swinging down the steep and winding path, my heart chanting a
psalm to the mountains. Mountains like cathedrals, with carved,
graceful spires; mountains like frozen waves left by some great sea
when the world was chaos; mountains like leaning towers of Pisa;
mountains like sentinel Titans; mountains silver-grey; mountains
dark-red. The "Pain de Sucre" was strangest of all in form, perhaps,
and Joseph distressed me much by remarking guilelessly that it, and
other white shapes at which he pointed, looked exactly like frosted
wedding-cakes. It was true; they did; but they looked like nobler
things also, and I resented having so cheap a simile put into my head.