He walked down to the road-way, and gazed long and anxiously into the distance. No signs of them yet! Where could they be? He returned to the house, and, ascending to his chamber, selected from among his books a volume in Latin by the renowned Cornelius Agrippa. He turned to the last chapter, “Ad Encomium Asini Digressio.”[28] He felt an intense interest at this moment in asses. It was possible some of their peculiarities had escaped his knowledge; he desired to ascertain. But he failed, under the peculiar circumstances, to fix his attention, so he laid the book aside, and returned to the regions below; to his solitary stroll up and down the gravel-walk, with an occasional pause for a long and anxious survey of the road. Even his meerschaum was forgotten or uncared for.
“But Time is faithful to his trust:
Only await, thou pining dust.”
Time, which does so much, at length brought them home. To his great relief, the trio reappeared, and, creeping slowly along, turned from the road into the gravel-walk and reached the house, all three evidently depressed in spirits.
III.
Jackey had been turned loose in the paddock on his return, not for good behavior; and he alternated there between nibbling the grass as assiduously as if he had engaged to mow the whole before next daylight, and standing still with his head thrust down and fixed, as motionless as if he had been carved out of stone.
“A singular animal truly,” said mein herr to himself as he looked down from his chamber window. “He reminds me—”
Here a summons to supper interrupted the reminiscence; and, when they were all revived with the delicious hot coffee and cream which the Frau von Steufle knew so well how to mix, Jans entered on his adventures as follows:
“I thought a donkey was a great traveller, and very careful and mindful, and to be trusted, and good on bad roads, and could eat what a donkey ought to eat, and not steal what was not meant for him.”
“Of course,” said the Herr von Heine; “you are right, he is a great traveller. I tried one myself on the Alps, that is, I began the Alps on a donkey; most people begin the Alps on a donkey, next a mule, then on foot, if they try Mont Blanc. I well remember the last view I took of the Jungfrau and its avalanches from the Wengern Alps. At the Hospice of St. Bernard I took a comfortable meal from the good monks, and then on foot and mule-back I mounted by way of Martigny and Tête Noire to Chamouni. In Egypt there is nothing like a donkey for the desert; when I was at Cairo (that was in my student life), many a pleasant morning I started out on a donkey, and spent the day among the ruins about there. Great climbers they are, so obedient and sure-footed. The little white donkeys of Egypt are beauties, long silky hair; the pashas value them highly. Certainly the ass is a traveller; the wild asses of Syria are fleet as the wind. Then, what would Rome be without donkeys? or any part of Italy, for that matter? Along the coasts, the bay of Naples, Mount Vesuvius, now over sand and stones and lava, and volcanic ashes fetlock-deep, now to explore pleasant fields, and woody paths, and old highways, always picking his way so carefully up and down steep places, by some path of his own you fail to see—why, you may ride on one to the very verge of a precipice, and take your view from his back, as safely as if you crept there on hands and knees! Oh! yes, they are great travellers, though sometimes slow.”