In a shop under a vaulting, that the crook of a shepherd Saint had blessed through hundreds of years, I bought a queer sort of woolly beast for the baby.
Going on yet higher up into the mountains, we met a dreary little funeral, coming down under umbrellas. The coffin, under a black cloth, was pushed along in a two-wheeled cart by a woman and a very old man. Some women and two or three old people followed, and some children and dogs.
It was not the funeral of a soldier, only of some one uselessly dead.
Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue and black and purple clouds, clear azure spaces, snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves arrested--all this as we went up, and up, with a rainbow like a bridge across the valley we were leaving behind us.
Up and up and up, into the young joy of the mountains, young as at the beginning of the world, joyous above all things. What do they care, the great mountains? They stand quite still, and all things pass. They lift their heads, and do not even know.
A baby cried because its father was gone away to war. Its mother did not cry at all.
A stranger came by and cried, not because of those especial people, but because of the world.
A little funeral straggled down the hill in the rain.
I thought, we went up high above all griefs.
Some children and a woman, from a hut up in the snow, came to beg of us.
I thought, for what did they need to beg, they, who had the everlasting snows? I thought, how absurd to beg for bread to live, in a place where death would be so pure and clear, would ring out so joyously. I thought, how nice it is that all the roads of life lead up to death. And that death, however come to, is so high a thing.
It was terribly cold. The snow was over us and under us, as the clouds were.
In the round basin circled with snows, the ancient hospice--that is no more a hospice, from which its old possessors have been driven away--stands white, beside the white road, in the close-cropped pasture. The sheep and tawny rough cattle were the only things that stirred. The smoke of the hospice chimneys stayed quite motionless in the golden air.
The music of the cow-bells was no more distinct a music than that of just the golden ringing of the air.