intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What
could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries.
Perhaps at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and the fall--

At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one candle to Our Lady
of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went well, and this
candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung up
in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be, but
peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing
above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely
old.

Well, then, having made this vow I still went on, with panic aiding
me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within a few feet of
the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away. Then my
resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from sleeper
to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond.

I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the little horrible strip
between heaven and hell--the perspective of its rails. I was made ill
by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men cross and recross
it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me!

There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont Terrible, and it
lies to a yard upon the straight line--_quid dicam_--the segment of
the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome.

The high bank or hillside before me was that which ends the gorge of
the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not
to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My way ran by a