you to be hours long, has not taken up a second of time; for the very
same noise which begins the dream, wakes you at the end of it: and so it
was with me. I dreamed that some English people had come into the hotel
where I was, and were sleeping in the room underneath me; and that they
had quarrelled and fought, and broke their bed down with a tremendous
crash, and that I must get up, and stop the fight; and at that moment I
woke and heard coming up the valley from the north such a roar as I never
heard before or since; as if a hundred railway trains were rolling
underground; and just as it passed under my bed there was a tremendous
thump, and I jumped out of bed quicker than I ever did in my life, and
heard the roaring sound die away as it rolled up the valley towards the
peaks of snow. Still I had in my head this notion of the Englishmen
fighting in the room below. But then I recollected that no Englishmen
had come in the night before, and that I had been in the room below, and
that there was no bed in it. Then I opened my window--a woman screamed,
a dog barked, some cocks and hens cackled in a very disturbed humour, and
then I could hear nothing but the roaring of the torrent a hundred feet
below. And then it flashed across me what all the noise was about; and I
burst out laughing and said "It is only an earthquake," and went to bed

Next morning I inquired whether any one had heard a noise. No, nobody
had heard anything. And the driver who had brought me up the valley only
winked, but did not choose to speak. At last at breakfast I asked the
pretty little maid who waited what was the meaning of the noise I heard
in the night, and she answered, to my intense amusement, "Ah! bah! ce
n'etait qu'un tremblement de terre; il y en a ici toutes les six
semaines." Now the secret was out. The little maid, I found, came from
the lowland far away, and did not mind telling the truth: but the good
people of the place were afraid to let out that they had earthquakes
every six weeks, for fear of frightening visitors away: and because they