Page:Hopkinson Smith--armchair at the inn.djvu/188

 settled himself in bed, when just as he was dozing off a fire broke out and in less than five minutes he, with the whole family, was shivering in a snow-bank while the house burned to the ground.

“And a most uncomfortable and demoralizing change it was, messieurs—one minute in warm white sheets and the next in a blanket of cold snow. What has always remained in my mind was the rapidity with which I passed from one personality to another.”

Brierley, taking up the thread, described his own sensations when, during a visit to a friend’s luxurious camp in the Adirondacks, he lost his way in the forest and for three days and nights kept himself alive on moose-buds and huckleberries.

“Poor grub when you have been living on porter-house steak and lobsters from Fulton Market and peaches from South Africa. Time, however, didn’t appeal to me as it did to Lemois, but hunger did, and I have never looked a huckleberry in the face since without the same queer feeling around my waistband.”

Appealed to by Herbert for some experiences of my own, I told how this same realization of intense and sudden contrasts always took pos-