and they all three did it together. Not only that – as I live to
tell the tale! – but just as it was falling quite dark, the three
came back, bringing with them a huge bearded Sapper, whom they
moved, by recital of the original wrong, to go through the same
performance, with the same complete absence of all possible
knowledge of it on the part of Straudenheim. And then they all
went away, arm in arm, singing.
I went away too, in the German chariot at sunrise, and rattled on,
day after day, like one in a sweet dream; with so many clear little
bells on the harness of the horses, that the nursery rhyme about
Banbury Cross and the venerable lady who rode in state there, was
always in my ears. And now I came to the land of wooden houses,
innocent cakes, thin butter soup, and spotless little inn bedrooms
with a family likeness to Dairies. And now the Swiss marksmen were
for ever rifle-shooting at marks across gorges, so exceedingly near
my ear, that I felt like a new Gesler in a Canton of Tells, and
went in highly-deserved danger of my tyrannical life. The prizes
at these shootings, were watches, smart handkerchiefs, hats,
spoons, and (above all) tea-trays; and at these contests I came
upon a more than usually accomplished and amiable countryman of my
own, who had shot himself deaf in whole years of competition, and
had won so many tea-trays that he went about the country with his
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
carriage full of them, like a glorified Cheap-Jack.
In the mountain-country into which I had now travelled, a yoke of
oxen were sometimes hooked on before the post-horses, and I went
lumbering up, up, up, through mist and rain, with the roar of
falling water for change of music. Of a sudden, mist and rain
would clear away, and I would come down into picturesque little
towns with gleaming spires and odd towers; and would stroll afoot
into market-places in steep winding streets, where a hundred women
in bodices, sold eggs and honey, butter and fruit, and suckled
their children as they sat by their clean baskets, and had such
enormous goitres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it
became a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began.
About this time, I deserted my German chariot for the back of a
mule (in colour and consistency so very like a dusty old hair trunk
I once had at school, that I half expected to see my initials in
brass-headed nails on his backbone), and went up a thousand rugged
ways, and looked down at a thousand woods of fir and pine, and
would on the whole have preferred my mule’s keeping a little nearer
to the inside, and not usually travelling with a hoof or two over
the precipice – though much consoled by explanation that this was
to be attributed to his great sagacity, by reason of his carrying
broad loads of wood at other times, and not being clear but that I
myself belonged to that station of life, and required as much room
as they. He brought me safely, in his own wise way, among the
passes of the Alps, and here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day;
being now (like Don Quixote on the back of the wooden horse) in the
region of wind, now in the region of fire, now in the region of
unmelting ice and snow. Here, I passed over trembling domes of
ice, beneath which the cataract was roaring; and here was received
under arches of icicles, of unspeakable beauty; and here the sweet
air was so bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in
the snow when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best.
At this part of the journey we would come, at mid-day, into half an
hour’s thaw: when the rough mountain inn would be found on an
island of deep mud in a sea of snow, while the baiting strings of
mules, and the carts full of casks and bales, which had been in an