Mephistopheles was in high spirits. Noah was very lively, which soon ended in a disagreement with Esmeralda. We had to quiet the contending parties. The offence charged against Noah we noted down, and it was a serious one. In a surreptitious manner Noah had possessed himself of his sister’s cloak, which he had tried on, with an attempted imitation of her distingué style of stepping over the rough banks of the Lera Elv. In Noah’s clumsy imitation of his sister’s movements, which were just the reverse of clumsy, he contrived to poke a hole through the Alpine cloak. We say no more, only we refer the reader to a paragraph of the short extracts from Prœsten Sundt’s work, in our Appendix, and, as there described, we feared similar results.
At about seven o’clock we encamped. The donkeys had done better in the cool of the evening; it was decided that they had quite enough to carry, without the addition of extra weight, especially over the rough and stony route before us. Adhering firmly to this resolve, unless for the purpose of crossing some river, the animals enjoyed this immunity for the rest of our wanderings. The part of the valley where we had halted for the night was very wild; there was very little verdure, except some low stunted bushes, moss, and heath. Ole and the gipsies gathered heath enough to make a fire for tea. The tents were pitched exactly opposite the “Smörstab Bræen” (Butter glacier). We contemplated with interest an outline of sharp dark peaks rising before us. Close to us, on the east side of the Lera Elv, extended the glacier of the “Blaabræen.” Beyond we could see the Tverbottenhornene. A short distance from our camp we found a deserted cabin occasionally used by reindeer hunters.
It is with much pleasure we are able to say that Noah and Esmeralda were not prevented, by results similar to those described in the paragraph referred to in the Appendix, from appearing at tea.
There was something so hors de voyage ordinaire in our wandering existence, so charming in the freshness of wild nature, so free from conventional restraint, lingering in regions not yet spoilt by so-called art, and disfigured by man’s attempts at civilisation. All was so silent, as we looked from our camp fire in delighted contemplation of the great glacier of the “Smörstab,” and the sharp-peaked mountains separating us, as it were, from other worlds. We had escaped for a time, the thousand and one cares, which beset us on every side in dense populations, and had left far behind those scenes, and voluptuous lures, which the poet saith Meek Peace was ever wont to shun.
Tea was cleared away by our energetic hobbinengree. We often silently congratulated ourselves that the tea service was of tin, such was the rapidity with which they sometimes vanished into her kettle bag.
Mr. Rödsheim, as the gipsies generally called Ole, commenced the manufacture of birchwood cruppers for our animals, in anticipation of steep mountain ways, and he also engaged his time on some hobbles of the same wood, which we wished to take to England. Then, as night came fast upon us, Ole selected his bed between two large rocks; with our spade he made with rough sods a sort of turf coffin, about a foot deep, over which he placed a large mass of heath roots, and moss which he had peeled off the ground, the moss being turned downwards; then our waterproof was placed over all. When his bed was ready, he proposed that we should start at five o’clock the next morning.
NORWEGIAN BIRCHWOOD CRUPPER.
“I shan’t get up at five o’clock!” shouted Esmeralda, in a shrill voice, which nearly broke the drum of Ole’s right ear. “I don’t care; I shan’t get up to please anybody!”
Noah and Zachariah looked at one another, as much as to say, “Dawdy! she’s up; may our good shorengero land safely on the other side.”