“Do you not see the number on their banner?” answers the youth; “they are the heroes of the forty-fifth section of the tenth branch of the northern division of the Savoy Alpine Club.”
“Ah!” the old man murmurs to himself, with a sigh of recollection, “I can remember that they were numerous even in my day.”
Then follows a sad-looking, dejected creature, stealing back to his hotel by byways, but with face bronzed from exposure on rocks, not scorched by sun-reflecting snow; his boots scored with multitudinous little cuts and scratches telling of difficult climbing; his hands as brown as his face; his finger-nails, it must be admitted, seriously impaired in their symmetry.
“And who is this? Has he been guilty of some crime?” the old man asks.
“Not so,” the answer comes; “he has just com[pg 321]pleted the thousandth ascent of the Aiguille...; he comes of a curious race which, history relates, at one time much frequented these districts; but that was a great while ago—long before the monarchy was re-established. You do well to look at him; that is the last of the climbing Englishmen. They always seem depressed when they have succeeded in achieving their ambition of the moment; it is a characteristic of their now almost extinct race.”
Mountaineering in the future
“And what about the perils of the expedition?” the old man asks, brightening up a little as if some old ideas had suddenly flashed across his mind. “I would fain know whether the journey is different now from what it was formerly; yet the heroes would mock me, perchance, if I were to interrogate them.”
“Not at all,” the youth replies. “There are but few of the first party who would not vouchsafe to give you a full account, and might even in their courtesy embellish the narrative with flowers of rhetoric. But it is unnecessary. They will print a detailed and full description of their exploits. It has all been said before, but so has everything else, I think.”
“That is true,” the old man murmurs to himself; “it was even so in my time, and two hundred years before I lived a French writer commenced his book with the remark, ‘Tout est dit.’ But what of the other, the dejected survivor? does he not too write?”
“Yes, indeed, but not in the same strain; he will [pg 322]but pour out a little gentle sarcasm and native spleen, in mild criticism of the fulsome periods he peruses in other tongues.”