“What! you disobey me? What sort of savage are you? You are the first Swedish peasant who ever refused to assist Dr. Stangstadius. I will inform against you, miserable rascal, I give you my word. I’ll complain of you!”
“To whom? The Baron de Waldemora?”
“No, for he would have you hung; and good enough for you, too. But I am kind-hearted; I want you to understand that. I am the best man alive, and I forgive you.”
“Nonsense!” said Christian, who could not help at times diverting himself a little with the strange persons whom he encountered in his wandering life. “I don’t know you, and I strongly suspect that you are not the person you claim to be. You a naturalist! Out upon you! You can’t even tell a horse from an ass.”
“An ass?” said Stangstadius, diverted at once, fortunately, from his whim of equitation; “do you pretend to have an ass there?”
He inspected Jean with his lantern; but thanks to Christian’s solicitude, the animal was so well wrapped up in skins of various kinds, that it presented a most fantastic appearance.
“An ass? It can’t be! An ass could not live in this latitude. What you, in your brutal ignorance, call an ass, is nothing more than some kind of mule at the most! Come, let me see it;—take off those borrowed skins—”
“Hold, monsieur!” said Christian; “whether Stangstadius or not, you have tired me out. I can’t talk with you any longer. Good-evening.”
With that, he tickled the legs of the faithful Jean with a switch; the animal broke into a trot, and the two quickly left the philosopher behind them. But soon, Christian, who was always good-natured, felt a sort of remorse for his rudeness. As he reached the edge of the lake, he looked back, and saw the poor doctor of sciences following on with much difficulty, and many slips and tumbles. He must really have been very much fatigued to have been at all conscious of it, for his identity was concentrated in his brains and in his tongue; and still more to have confessed it: for he claimed to be the most robust man of the age.
“If his strength should fail him,” thought Christian, “he might lie down there on the ice, and, in this region, a moment’s sleep out of doors on such a night as this would, perhaps, be fatal—particularly to a feeble being like that. Come, stand still, Jean! wait for me.”