“A little, herr,” said the guide, smiling—“not a great deal. It is beyond us. We know by the clouds and mists high above the mountains when it is safe to go and when to stay; for if we see long-drawn and rugged clouds hanging about the points and trailing down the cols and over each icy grat, we know there is a tempest raging and we do not go. There is not much wisdom in that. It is very simple, and— Look! the young herr is fast asleep. Poor boy!—it has been a tiring day. Shall we go to rest?”
“Yes,” said Dale, laying his hand on Saxe’s shoulder. “Come, boy, rouse up and let’s go to bed.”
“Eh? What? Where? Sliding down and— Did you speak, Mr Dale?” said Saxe, after starting up and babbling excitedly for a moment or two, just fresh from his dreams.
“Wake up! I’m going to bed.”
“Wake up, of course,” said Saxe tetchily. “Mustn’t a—?”
He stopped short, colouring a little; and at that moment he turned sharply, for there was a loud sneeze from below, and directly after a youngish man, with a lowering look and some bits of hay sticking in his hair, came out from the cowhouse and slouched by the front, glancing up with half-shut eyes towards the occupants of the verandah, on his way to a low stone-built shingle-roofed place, from which sundry bleatings told that it was the refuge of the herd of goats.
Saxe was too sleepy to think then, and their host being summoned, he showed them through the chalet into a long low room with a sloping roof and boarded floor, in two corners of which lay a quantity of clean hay and twigs of some dry heathery-looking plant.
“Gute nacht,” he said briefly, and went out, leaving the door open.
“Do we sleep here?” said Saxe, yawning. “No beds no chests of drawers, no washstands, no carpets.”
“No, boy: nothing but clean hay and a roof over our heads,” replied Dale. “Shall you mind?”