for him while
he went in and drank.

How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps understand, unless
you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses'
heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. And I was the
more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of this kind
of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc
for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
course, expected him to bring in his own hands.

Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
that you find there.

Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
held this horse.

I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was
restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And
all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man
were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the
people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as
they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing
at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a
book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me
they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they
were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a
great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind
down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and
all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as y