The hill was above us in heather on our left, below us in steep pasture on the right, and the Tommies were digging their hoofs into a slanting ledge between the two. We ascended slowly, clinging to the ponies’ manes, I in advance of Miss O’Flannigan, who was in one of her most conversational moods, and demanded my frequent appreciation of the landscape with an enthusiasm that seemed to me ill-timed. Each time I so much as turned my head, the saddle and the hold-all turned sympathetically with me, and I was in the act of ignoring an appeal to my æsthetic feelings when Miss O’Flannigan’s voice ceased abruptly. This was so unusual an occurrence that I took a fresh handful of the mane and looked round. Miss O’Flannigan was standing on her head on the off-side of her pony, on whose back nothing was now visible except the girths, while beneath his body hung the hold-all. What it was that formed the link between him and Miss O’Flannigan was not apparent, but as he was eating grass with unshaken calm it was not a matter of vital importance.
Before I had dismounted and reached the scene of the disaster Miss O’Flannigan was free: she had, in fact, rolled over the edge of the ledge into a clump of heather, and was emerging from it, hatless, and in a state of the highest indignation. There is an unconscious, undesired picturesqueness about a person whose hair has come down, and I did not altogether refrain from mentioning this to Miss O’Flannigan, but she had lost her interest in the picturesque. The Tommies, fortunately, viewed the affair from one aspect only—that of a heaven-bestowed interval for food; and during the arduous processes of re-saddling and of binding the hold-alls, like burnt-offerings, to the horns of the saddles (for we had determined upon walking till we reached the top of the hill), they did not give us a moment’s anxiety.
No eyes but those of the aghast, black-faced sheep and the coldly interested carrion-crows witnessed the occurrence, or the subsequent procession upwards, over slippery grass and through the boundless quagmires caused by a stream that seemed newly spilled on the face of the hill, and was still wandering in search of a bed. The hut on the top of Snowdon was visible—an angular atom, retaining even, as a silhouette of the eighth of an inch square, its air of gamin self-sufficiency and adequacy for its position of overseer to England and Wales. With the aid of field-glasses, it and its inmates might have come to the conclusion that two aproned and gaitered Deans of the Church of England were leading a pair of heavy-laden sumpter-palfreys over the pass to Llanberis, or might eventually have made the discovery that the most simple manner of adapting a riding-habit to mountain walks is not necessarily the most graceful.
From our private point of view it seemed many times that we had gone as high as was possible before we found the gate that was to compose all difficulties. It linked two long strips of grey wall that had striven towards each other from afar, down mountain flanks and up from boggy valleys, like two lives fated to meet and overcoming circumstance. Their juncture was, as the boy had truly said, on the highest point of the hill; and leaning breathless on the gate, while the
The ascent of the Deans.
Tommies tore at the wiry little rushes which grew all about, we looked down a deep, empty valley to open country with the glint of water and the smoke of villages. A track of two feet wide sprang from the farther side of the gate and drew
