familiar. Who is he?"

His co-voyageur was without curiosity; the former pallidness and silentness resumed their dominion over him, and the lesser gentleman settled moodily back to his newspaper.

No word was interchanged for several hours. They passed through shaggy glens, under toppled towers and battlements, by squalid villages, and within the sound of dashing streams. If they descended ever, it was to gain breath for a longer ascent; for now the mountain snows were above them on either side, and the Alps rose sublimely impassable in front. The hawks careened beneath them; the chamois above dared not look down for dizziness, and Hugenot said, at Ariola, that they were taking lunch in a balloon. The manner of Mr. Plade now altered marvellously. It might have been his breakfast that gave him spirit and speech; he sang a merry, bad song, which the rocks echoed back, and all the goitred women at the roadside stopped with[Pg 73] their pack burdens to listen. He told a thousand anecdotes. He knew all the story of the pass; how the Swiss, filing through it, had scattered the Milanese; how Suwarrow and Massena had made its sterility fertile with blood.

[Pg 73]

Hugenot's admiration amounted to envy. He had never known his associate so brilliant, so pleasing; the exaltation was too great, indeed, to arise from any ordinary cause; but Hugenot was not shrewd enough to inquire into the affair. He wearied at length of the talk and of the scene, and when at last they reached the region of perpetual ice, he closed the cabriolet windows, and watched the filtering flakes, and heard the snow crush under the wheels, and dropped into a deep sleep which the other seemed to share.

The clouds around them made the mountains dusky, and the interior of the carriage was quite gloomy. At length the large gentleman turned his head, so that his ear could catch every breath, and he regarded the dim outlines of the lesser with motionless interest. Then he took a straw from the litter at his feet, and, bending forward, touched his comrade's throat. The other snored measuredly for a while, but the titillation startled him at length, and he beat the air in his slumber. When the irritation ceased he breathed tranquilly again, and then the first-named placed his hand softly into the sleeper's pocket. He drew forth the wallet with steady fingers, and as coolly emptied it of its contents. These he concealed in the leg of his boot, but replaced the book where he had found it. For a little space he remained at rest, leaning against the back of the carriage, 

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