Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/445

Rh who had formed a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned him, and was last seen making off due west. This weird man at that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep walker, or an enthusiast, or a robber; but, I awoke one night to find him in the dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific voice. I paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with all possible precipitation.

That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little inn in Switzerland, while I was staying there. It was a very homely place, in a village of one narrow, zigzag street among mountains, and you went in at the main door through the cow-house, and among the mules and the dogs and the fowls, before ascending a great bare staircase to the rooms: which were all of unpainted wood, without plastering or papering—like rough packing-cases. Outside, there was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with a copper-colored steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and mountain-sides.

A young man belonging to this inn, had disappeared eight weeks before (it was winter-time), and was supposed to have had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier. He had got up in the night, and dropped into the village street from the loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done it so quietly, that his companion and fellow-laborer had heard no movement when he was awakened in the morning, and they said "Louis, where is Henri?" They looked for him high and low, in vain, and gave him up. Now, outside this inn there stood, as there stood outside every dwelling in the village, a stack of fire-wood; but, the stack belonging to the inn was higher than any of the rest, because the inn was the richest house and burned the most fuel. It began to be noticed, while they were looking high and low, that a bantam cock, part of the livestock of the inn, put himself wonderfully out of his way to get to the top of this wood-stack; and that he would stay there for hours and hours, crowing, until he appeared in danger of splitting himself. Five weeks went on—six weeks—and still this terrible bantam, neglecting his domestic affairs, was always on the top of the wood-stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head. By this time it