“The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn.”
incipient boon-companionship, but the conversation was not given time to expand with the luxuriance of which it was doubtless capable. The door of the cabin was opened, and Griffith Roberts stood without, waiting for his lawful five shillings, and, subsequently, the price of a drink (which, in deference to our possible scruples, was entitled “ginger-beer”). We bade him good-bye without a pang. He is a good man, and would be invaluable as hare for a paper-chase; but if we ever ascend Snowdon again—which Heaven forfend—it will not be under his guidance.
We stood at the door and watched him go down and down through the lifeless twilight, till the cold bit through and through our summer coats and linen shirts, and a precept of early youth rose menacingly in our minds:—
“Whatever brawls disturb the street,
Wear flannel next your skin.”
What if we both developed influenza on the top of Snowdon! Some preservative was instantly necessary: we hurriedly appealed to the proprietor of the cabin for hot water, and were supplied with a boiling jugful on the spot. The Summit Hotel does not go in for style, but it understands the mystery of boiling water, which is a thing too deep for many of its betters.
I have often had cause to curse the day on which it was revealed to Miss O’Flannigan, by a palmist, that she was subject to medical inspirations; but even the power of speech was denied to me for some minutes after I had tasted the mixture of Bovril, whisky, and hot water, compounded by my companion under the influence of her latest inspiration. Our fellow-tourist, after a period of aghast observation, attacked his note-book with an ardour that convinces us that the recipe will be made glorious by his pen in the columns of the ‘Brixton Chanticleer.’ Then he drew forth a pipe and tobacco-pouch, and looked first at the mists which were pressing against the little port-hole of a window behind his head, and then at us. We accepted the hint, and retired to the cabin allotted to us.
It was about seven feet square, and contained a bedstead that covered all the room save a strip of two feet, on which stood a doll’s chest of drawers with a small jug and basin on it. In the face of the fact that there was but one other bedroom, it was idle to speculate as to how the forty visitors of the night before had disposed themselves; but a very cursory investigation of the sheets forced us to the conclusion that many of them had gone to bed in their boots. Possibly they were right. Top-boots and an entire suit of oil-skins would alone have brought those sheets within the sphere of practical politics. We wrapped ourselves in the blankets, and lay down, fully clad, to wait for the dawn.
Never before that night had I known how much more miserable one may be made by sleep than by the want of it. The thin doses forced on us by fatigue had the property of magnifying-glasses, and turned a vague insufficiency of pillow into a broken neck, the cold and stiffness into centuries of Arctic hardship. A monotonous wind sighed round the shanty, and the small uncurtained window held a changeless square of ghostly light, that, in the intervals of the fevered dreams of this midsummer’s night, became a giant luminous matchbox hanging on the wall beside us. Once or twice Miss O’Flannigan broached in gloomy monologue reflections proper to the occasion, their leit motif being that we, the newspaper-man, and the two shanty proprietors, were the five highest people in England. I cannot remember that I contributed to the conversation anything more appropriate than the remark of a slighted Dublin aristocrat, in vindication of her rights of precedence, “and me the rankest lady in the room,”—which, indeed, had only a remote and dreamlike connection with the subject.
The luminous paint in the window-frame was just perceptibly brighter when the door of the opposite shanty opened, and we heard a heavy step outside. By this time we had become reconciled to the blankets, and we held our breaths with the dread that there might be a sunrise, and that we should have to go out into the piercing air to look at it. There was a battering upon the Brixtonian door, and then a voice: “It’s a quarter past three, sir, and it’s a very thick morning,” and then our heroic fellow-traveller: “Never mind, I’m comin’ out.”