apologizing for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until
they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended--rather
mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then
the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I
replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go
herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a
half's road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode
forward again up the hillside in the gathering dusk.

I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp
ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view,
looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mezenc
and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a
cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen
together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the
outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white,
irregular patch to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a
blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a
gorge.

Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld
a village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the
neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road
smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the
fields; and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all,
dashed past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been
to church and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At
Bouchet St. Nicholas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my
destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these
confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was
cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached like tooth-ache from
perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to camp, and asked
for the _auberge_.

I HAVE A GOAD

The _auberge_ of Bouchet St. Nicholas was among the least pretentious I
have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.
Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of
two stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a
suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture
of the plainest, earthen floors, a single bed-chamber for travel