impervious; the whips were cracked in vain, and in vain were brought
more directly to bear upon the senses of the recusants; the men howled,
and rattled the chains, and re-arranged the clumsy head-gear, but all to
no purpose. The man who did most of the howling was a black Burgundian
dwarf, in a long blouse and moustaches; and he did it in so frightful a
patois, that the oxen were right in their refusal to understand. We
represented to M. Paget that it would be possible to make our way
through the wheat; but he declared himself perfectly happy where he was,
and declined to take any steps in the matter; whereupon I assumed the
command of the expedition, and led the horse through the corn, thus
turning the flank of the _sapin_ and its attendants. Our driver
submitted to this act of violence much as a member of the Society of
Friends allows a chamberlain to remove his hat from behind when he is
favoured with an audience of the sovereign; and when we regained the
high road, he meekly took up the reins and drove us at a good pace to
Arc.

The village lies in a curiously open plain, with a girdle of hills, in
one of which the glacières were supposed to lie. The first _auberge_
refused us admittance, on the ground that the dinner was all
pre-engaged, and the result was that we found a pleasanter place higher
up the village, near a vast new _maison de ville_ with every window
shattered by recent hail. The people groaned over the unnecessary
expense of this huge building, which might well, from its size, have
been a home for the whole village; and they told us that the communal
forests had been terribly over-cut to provide the money for it. Our
first demand was for food; our next, for a guide to the glacières. Food
we could have; but why _should_ we wish to go to the glacières, when
there was so much else worth seeing at a little distance?--a guide might
without doubt be found, but there was nothing to be seen when we got