a pack upon a pack-saddle against a
gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that
serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so
exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?

I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this
season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round
it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to
peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was
black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc,
which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a
tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed
fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through
this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal
size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in
Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in
squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast
great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene.

Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill
and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the
old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But
the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung
with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its
chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious
statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very
model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for
bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the
landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in
black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own,
with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set
out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one
of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I
do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh,
from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of
some great wood.

OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS

_I behold
The House, the Brotherhood austere--
And what am I, that I am here?_

MATTHEW ARNOLD.