Chapter Seventeen.
Danger and Death on the Glacier.
Daylight—blessed daylight! How often longed for by the sick and weary! How imperfectly appreciated by those whose chief thoughts and experiences of night are fitly expressed by the couplet:—
“Bed, bed, delicious bed,
Haven of rest for the weary head.”
Daylight came at last, to the intense relief of poor Lewis, who had become restless as the interminable night wore on, and the cold seemed to penetrate to his very marrow. Although unable to sleep, however, he lay perfectly still, being anxious not to interrupt the rest of his companion. But Le Croix, like the other, did not sleep soundly; he awoke several times, and, towards morning, began to dream and mutter short sentences.
At first Lewis paid no attention to this, but at length, becoming weary of his own thoughts, he set himself with a half-amused feeling to listen. The amusement gave place to surprise and to a touch of sadness when he found that the word ‘gold’ frequently dropped from the sleeper’s lips.
“Can it be,” he thought, “that this poor fellow is really what they say, a half-crazed gold-hunter? I hope not. It seems nonsensical. I never heard of there being gold in these mountains. Yet it may be so, and too much longing after gold is said to turn people crazy. I shouldn’t wonder if it did.”
Thoughts are proverbial wanderers, and of a wayward spirit, and not easy of restraint. They are often very honest too, and refuse to flatter. As the youth lay on his back gazing dreamily from that giddy height on the first faint tinge of light that suffused the eastern sky, his thoughts rambled on in the same channel.