s though cool winds from the mountains
brought other growths to birth, so that they met with bushes straggling
wild; free, careless and mysterious, as they do, where there is none to
teach great Nature how to be tidy.

The wanderers chose a clump of these that were gathered near the way,
like gypsies camped awhile midway on a wonderful journey, who at dawn
will rise and go, leaving but a bare trace of their resting and no
guess of their destiny; so fairy-like, so free, so phantasmal those
dark shrubs seemed.

Morano lay down on the very edge of the shade of one, and Rodriguez lay
fair in the midst of the shade of another, whereby anyone passing that
way would have known which was the older traveller. Morano, according
to his custom, was asleep almost immediately; but Rodriguez, with
wonder and speculation each toying with novelty and pulling it
different ways between them, stayed awhile wakeful. Then he too slept,
and a bird thought it safe to return to an azalea of its own; which it
lately fled from troubled by the arrival of these two.

And Rodriguez the last to sleep was the first awake, for the shade of
the shrub left him, and he awoke in the blaze of the sun to see Morano
still sheltered, well in the middle now of the shadow he chose. The
gross sleep of Morano I will not describe to you, reader. I have chosen
a pleasant tale for you in a happy land, in the fairest time of year,
in a golden age: I have youth to show you and an ancient sword, birds,
flowers and sunlight, in a plain unharmed by any dream of commerce: why
should I show you the sleep of that inelegant man whose bulk lay
cumbering the earth like a low, unseemly mountain?

Rodriguez overtook the shade he had lost and lay there resting until
Morano awoke, driven all at once from sleep by a dream or by mere
choking. Then from the intricacies of his clothing, which to him after
those two days was what home is to some far wanderer, Morano drew out
once more a lump of bacon. Then came the fry-pan and then a fire: it
was the Wanderers' Mess. That mess-room has stood in many lands and has
only one roof. We are proud of that roof, all we who belong to that
Mess. We boast of it when we show it to our friends when it is all set
out at night. It has Aldebaran in it, the Bear and Orion, and at the
other end the Southern Cross. Yes we are proud of our roof when it is
at its best.

What am I saying? I should be talking of bacon. Yes, but there is a way
of cooking