persons, men and women, and were duly introduced to us by our host
as Theodor and Augustin Raoul. A wooden bench by the hearth was
accorded them, the great dogs couched at their feet, pipes were
lit here and there among the circle; and the scene, embellished
by the ruddy glow of the flaming pine-logs, the unfamiliar costume
of the peasantry, the quaint furniture of the chalet-kitchen in
which we sat, and enhanced by the strange circumstances of our
journey and the yet stranger story now recounted by the two Raouls,
became to my mind every moment more romantic and unworld-like.
But the intent and strained expression of St. Aubyn's features as
he bent eagerly forward, hanging as if for life or death on the
words which the brothers poured forth, reminded me that, in one
respect at least, the spectacle before me presented a painful reality,
and that for this desolate and lonely man every word of the Christmas
tale told that evening was pregnant with import of the deepest and
most serious kind. Here, in English guise, is the legend of the
Alpine seer, recounted with much gesticulation and rugged dramatic
force by his grandsons, the younger occasionally interpolating
details which the elder forgot, confirming the data, and echoing
with a sonorous interjection the exclamations of the listeners.

Augustin Franz Raoul, the grandfather of the men who addressed us,
originally differed in no respect, save that of blindness, from
ordinary people. One Christmas Eve, as the day drew towards twilight,
and a driving storm of frozen snow raged over the mountains, he,
his dog Hans, and his mule were fighting their way home up the pass
in the teeth of the tempest. At a turn of the road they came on
a priest carrying the Viaticum to a dying man who inhabited a solitary
but in the valley below. The priest was on foot, almost spent with
fatigue, and bewildered by the blinding snow which obscured the