A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

But the most frightened creature I saw, was a led horse

that overtook us. Poor fellow, he had been born and reared

in the grassy levels of the Kandersteg valley and had

never seen anything like this hideous place before.

Every few steps he would stop short, glance wildly out from

the dizzy height, and then spread his red nostrils wide

and pant as violently as if he had been running a race;

and all the while he quaked from head to heel as with

a palsy. He was a handsome fellow, and he made a fine

statuesque picture of terror, but it was pitiful to see

him suffer so.

This dreadful path has had its tragedy. Baedeker, with his

customary overterseness, begins and ends the tale thus:

“The descent on horseback should be avoided.

In 1861 a Comtesse d’Herlincourt fell from her saddle

over the precipice and was killed on the spot.”

We looked over the precipice there, and saw the monument

which commemorates the event. It stands in the bottom

of the gorge, in a place which has been hollowed out of

the rock to protect it from the torrent and the storms.

Our old guide never spoke but when spoken to, and then

limited himself to a syllable or two, but when we asked

him about this tragedy he showed a strong interest

in the matter. He said the Countess was very pretty,

and very young–hardly out of her girlhood, in fact.

She was newly married, and was on her bridal tour.

The young husband was riding a little in advance; one guide

was leading the husband’s horse, another was leading the

bride’s.

The old man continued:

“The guide that was leading the husband’s horse happened

to glance back, and there was that poor young thing sitting

up staring out over the precipice; and her face began

to bend downward a little, and she put up her two hands

slowly and met it–so,–and put them flat against her

eyes–so–and then she sank out of the saddle, with a

sharp shriek, and one caught only the flash of a dress,

and it was all over.”

Then after a pause:

“Ah, yes, that guide saw these things–yes, he saw them all.

He saw them all, just as I have told you.”

After another pause:

“Ah, yes, he saw them all. My God, that was ME.

I was that guide!”

This had been the one event of the old man’s life; so one

may be sure he had forgotten no detail connected with it.

We listened to all he had to say about what was done and what

happened and what was said after the sorrowful occurrence,

and a painful story it was.

When we had wound down toward the valley until we were about

on the last spiral of the corkscrew, Harris’s hat blew

over the last remaining bit of precipice–a small cliff

a hundred or hundred and fifty feet high–and sailed down

toward a steep slant composed of rough chips and fragments

which the weather had flaked away from the precipices.

We went leisurely down there, expecting to find it without

any trouble, but we had made a mistake, as to that.

We hunted during a couple of hours–not because the old

straw hat was valuable, but out of curiosity to find out

how such a thing could manage to conceal itself in open

ground where there was nothing left for it to hide behind.

When one is reading in bed, and lays his paper-knife down,

he cannot find it again if it is smaller than a saber;

that hat was as stubborn as any paper-knife could have been,

and we finally had to give it up; but we found a fragment

that had once belonged to an opera-glass, and by digging

around and turning over the rocks we gradually collected

all the lenses and the cylinders and the various odds

and ends that go to making up a complete opera-glass.

We afterward had the thing reconstructed, and the owner

can have his adventurous lost-property by submitting

proofs and paying costs of rehabilitation. We had hopes

of finding the owner there, distributed around amongst

the rocks, for it would have made an elegant paragraph;