starch out of one's moral nature.

All at once I was aroused from my apathy by a shout from the front
calling out to the cavalcade to halt. I must observe a fellow on foot
was leading the way in quality of guide. A pretty sort of a guide he
turned out to be. He had led us quite wrong, and in fact found all of a
sudden that he was on the verge of a precipice!

There was a good deal of unparliamentary language, expressed in tones
both loud and deep. It was an act of unwisdom, however, to stop there in
a heap on the grassy slope of a precipice, swearing in chorus at the
poor devil of a Wallack. I turned my horse up the incline, resolved to
try back, hoping to regain the lost track. It was next to impossible to
halt, for we had not even got our plaids with us--everything was with
the baggage-horses. Of course "some one had blundered." We all knew
that! The guide stuck to it to the last that "he had not exactly lost
his way." The fellow was incapable of a suggestion, and would have stood
there arguing till doomsday if we had not sent him off with a sharp
injunction to find some shepherds, and that quickly, who could take us
to the rendezvous. Being summer time, there would be many shepherds
about in different places on the Alpen, and the Wallack could hardly
fail to encounter some herdkeeper before long.

We waited, as agreed, on the same spot nearly an hour, and then we heard
a great shouting to the right of us. This was the guide, who I believe
must have been born utterly without the organ of locality. He had found
some shepherds, he told us subsequently, not long after he had left us,
but then the fool of a fellow could not find his way back to us, to the
spot where we agreed to wait for him. There was a great deal of shouting
before we could bring him to our bearings: the fog muffled the sound,