One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them.
Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit
of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote
heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty quantity of red
wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had
time to sink into the snow.
This is not my simile. It was made for the occasion by the
stoutest courier, who was a German. None of the others took any
more notice of it than they took of me, sitting on another bench on
the other side of the convent door, smoking my cigar, like them,
and - also like them - looking at the reddened snow, and at the
lonely shed hard by, where the bodies of belated travellers, dug
out of it, slowly wither away, knowing no corruption in that cold
region.
The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; the mountain
became white; the sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose; and the air
turned piercing cold. The five couriers buttoned their rough
coats. There being no safer man to imitate in all such proceedings
than a courier, I buttoned mine.
The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a
conversation. It is a sublime sight, likely to stop conversation.
The mountain being now out of the sunset, they resumed. Not that I
had heard any part of their previous discourse; for indeed, I had
not then broken away from the American gentleman, in the
travellers' parlour of the convent, who, sitting with his face to
the fire, had undertaken to realise to me the whole progress of
events which had led to the accumulation by the Honourable Ananias
Dodger of one of the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made in
our country.
'My God!' said the Swiss courier, speaking in French, which I do
not hold (as some authors appear to do) to be such an all-
sufficient excuse for a naughty word, that I have only to write it
in that language to make it innocent; 'if you talk of ghosts - '
'But I DON'T talk of ghosts,' said the German.
'Of what then?' asked the Swiss.
'If I knew of what then,' said the German, 'I should probably know
a great deal more.'
It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious. So, I
moved my position to that corner of my bench which was nearest to
them, and leaning my back against the convent wall, heard
perfectly, without appearing to attend.
'Thunder and lightning!' said the German, warming, 'when a certain
man is coming to see you, unexpectedly; and, without his own
knowledge, sends some invisible messenger, to put the idea of him
into your head all day, what do you call that? When you walk along
a crowded street - at Frankfort, Milan, London, Paris - and think
that a passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then that
another passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin
to have a strange foreknowledge that presently you'll meet your
friend Heinrich - which you do, though you believed him at Trieste
- what do you call THAT?'
'It's not uncommon, either,' murmured the Swiss and the other
three.
'Uncommon!' said the German. 'It's as common as cherries in the
Black Forest. It's as common as maccaroni at Naples.
