Scene of Matthisson's Poem Imitating Gray's 'Elegy.'"
"Shall we have a carriage?" he pursued. At this question my face contracted as by the effect of a nervous attack. I thought of the few pence I possessed. I assumed the determined pedestrian.
"For shame!" I cried: "it is but three miles. Where are your tourist muscles? I should like to walk."
"Nothing simpler," said the man of facile views: "we shall do it within the hour."
"Wine or Beer!"
I breathed again. We set off. We had before us cliffs and hills, with small Gothic towers printed on the blue of the sky; but the mountain-path beneath our steps was sanded, graveled, packed, rolled, weeded, and provided with coquettish sofas at every hundred steps. I, who happened that afternoon to feel the emotions of Manfred, would gladly have exchanged these detestable conveniences for precipices, storms and eagles.
"How ridiculous," I said with a little temper, "to go to a ruin by way of the boulevards!"
"Ah," said my companion of complaisant manners, "you like Nature? It is but the choosing."