At this stage of the narrative, which I heard many times (by

request) from the lips of Captain Nicholas B.'s sister-in-law, my
grandmother, I used to tremble with excitement.

The dog barked. And if he had done no more than bark, three
officers of the Great Napoleon's army would have perished

honourably on the points of Cossacks' lances, or perchance
escaping the chase would have died decently of starvation. But

before they had time to think of running away that fatal and
revolting dog, being carried away by the excess of the zeal,

dashed out through a gap in the fence. He dashed out and died.
His head, I understand, was severed at one blow from his body. I

understand also that later on, within the gloomy solitudes of the
snow-laden woods, when, in a sheltering hollow, a fire had been

lit by the party, the condition of the quarry was discovered to
be distinctlyunsatisfactory. It was not thin--on the contrary,

it seemed unhealthily obese; its skin showed bare patches of an
unpleasant character. However, they had not killed that dog for

the sake of the pelt. He was large. . . . He was eaten. . . .
The rest is silence. . . .

A silence in which a small boy shudders and says firmly:
"I could not have eaten that dog."

And his grandmother remarks with a smile:
"Perhaps you don't know what it is to be hungry."

I have learned something of it since. Not that I have been
reduced to eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal,

which, in the language of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache
enragee; I have lived on ancient salt junk, I know the taste of

shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes containing
things without a name--but of the Lithuanian village dog--never!

I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is not I, but my
granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de la

Legion d'Honneur, etc., who in his young days, had eaten the
Lithuanian dog.

I wish he had not. The childishhorror of the deed clings
absurdly to the grizzled man. I am perfectlyhelpless against

it. Still, if he really had to, let us charitably remember that
he had eaten him on active service, while bearing up bravely

against the greatest military disaster of modern history, and, in
a manner, for the sake of his country. He had eaten him to

appease his hunger, no doubt, but also for the sake of an
unappeasable and patriotic desire, in the glow of a great faith

that lives still, and in the pursuit of a great illusion kindled
like a false beacon by a great man to lead astray the effort of a

brave nation.
Pro patria!

Looked at in that light, it appears a sweet and decorous meal.
And looked at in the same light, my own diet of la vache enragee

appears a fatuous and extravagant form of self-indulgence; for
why should I, the son of a land which such men as these have

turned up with their plowshares and bedewed with their blood,
undertake the pursuit of fantastic meals of salt junk and

hardtack upon the wide seas? On the kindest view it seems an
unanswerable question. Alas! I have the conviction that there

are men of unstained rectitude who are ready to murmur scornfully
the word desertion. Thus the taste of innocent adventure may be

made bitter to the palate. The part of the inexplicable should
be al lowed for in appraising the conduct of men in a world where

no explanation is final. No charge of faithlessness ought to be
lightly uttered. The appearances of this perishable life are

deceptive, like everything that falls under the judgment of our
imperfect senses. The inner voice may remain true enough in its

secret counsel. The fidelity to a special tradition may last
through the events of an unrelated existence, following

faithfully, too, the traced way of an inexplicable impulse.
It would take too long to explain the intimatealliance of

contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at
times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no

possible explanation. Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most
intelligent of all the virtues. I venture to think that it is

one of the least common, if not the most uncommon of all. I
would not imply by this that men are foolish--or even most men.

Far from it. The barber and the priest, backed by the whole
opinion of the village, condemned justly the conduct of the

ingenious hidalgo, who, sallying forth from his native place,
broke the head of the muleteer, put to death a flock of

inoffensive sheep, and went through very doleful experiences in a
certain stable. God forbid that an unworthy churl should escape

merited censure by hanging on to the stirrup-leather of the
sublime caballero. His was a very noble, a very unselfish

fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser
mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that

exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After
reading so many romances he desired naively to escape with his

very body from the intolerablereality of things. He wished to
meet, eye to eye, the valorous giant Brandabarbaran, Lord of

Arabia, whose armour is made of the skin of a dragon, and whose
shield, strapped to his arm, is the gate of a fortified city.

Oh, amiable and natural weakness! Oh, blessedsimplicity of a
gentle heart without guile! Who would not succumb to such a

consoling temptation? Nevertheless, it was a form of
self-indulgence, and the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha was not a

good citizen. The priest and the barber were not unreasonable in
their strictures. Without going so far as the old King

Louis-Philippe, who used to say in his exile, "The people are
never in fault"--one may admit that there must be some

righteousness in the assent of a whole village. Mad! Mad! He
who kept in pious meditation the ritual vigil-of-arms by the well

of an inn and knelt reverently to be knighted at daybreak by the
fat, sly rogue of a landlord has come very near perfection. He

rides forth, his head encircled by a halo--the patron saint of
all lives spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of

imagination. But he was not a good citizen.
Perhaps that and nothing else was meant by the well-remembered

exclamation of my tutor.
It was in the jolly year 1873, the very last year in which I have

had a jolly holiday. There have been idle years afterward, jolly
enough in a way and not altogether without their lesson, but this

year of which I speak was the year of my last school-boy holiday.
There are other reasons why I should remember that year, but they

are too long to state formally in this place. Moreover, they
have nothing to do with that holiday. What has to do with the

holiday is that before the day on which the remark was made we
had seen Vienna, the Upper Danube, Munich, the Falls of the

Rhine, the Lake of Constance,--in fact, it was a memorable
holiday of travel. Of late we had been tramping slowly up the

Valley of the Reuss. It was a delightful time. It was much more
like a stroll than a tramp. Landing from a Lake of Lucerne

steamer in Fluelen, we found ourselves at the end of the second
day, with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps, a little

way beyond Hospenthal. This is not the day on which the remark
was made: in the shadows of the deep valley and with the

habitations of men left some way behind, our thoughts ran not
upon the ethics of conduct, but upon the simpler human problem of

shelter and food. There did not seem anything of the kind in
sight, and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly, at a

bend of the road, we came upon a building, ghostly in the
twilight.

At that time the work on the St. Gothard Tunnel was going on, and
that magnificententerprise of burrowing was directly responsible

for the unexpected building, standing all alone upon the very
roots of the mountains. It was long, though not big at all; it

was low; it was built of boards, without ornamentation, in
barrack-hut style, with the white window-frames quite flush with

the yellow face of its plain front. And yet it was a hotel; it
had even a name, which I have forgotten. But there was no gold

laced doorkeeper at its humble door. A plain but vigorous
servant-girl answered our inquiries, then a man and woman who

owned the place appeared. It was clear that no travellers were
expected, or perhaps even desired, in this strange hostelry,

which in its severe style resembled the house which sur mounts
the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks, the

universal possession of European childhood. However, its roof