play and not been able to get in; that we have all dreamed much
more of our youth than of our later lives; that - I have lost it!
The thread's broken.

And up I go. I, lying here with the night-light before me, up I
go, for no reason on earth that I can find out, and drawn by no
links that are visible to me, up the Great Saint Bernard! I have
lived in Switzerland, and rambled among the mountains; but, why I
should go there now, and why up the Great Saint Bernard in
preference to any other mountain, I have no idea. As I lie here
broad awake, and with every sense so sharpened that I can
distinctly hear distant noises inaudible to me at another time, I
make that journey, as I really did, on the same summer day, with
the same happy party - ah! two since dead, I grieve to think - and
there is the same track, with the same black wooden arms to point
the way, and there are the same storm-refuges here and there; and
there is the same snow falling at the top, and there are the same
frosty mists, and there is the same intensely cold convent with its
menagerie smell, and the same breed of dogs fast dying out, and the
same breed of jolly young monks whom I mourn to know as humbugs,
and the same convent parlour with its piano and the sitting round
the fire, and the same supper, and the same lone night in a cell,
and the same bright fresh morning when going out into the highly
rarefied air was like a plunge into an icy bath. Now, see here
what comes along; and why does this thing stalk into my mind on the
top of a Swiss mountain!

It is a figure that I once saw, just after dark, chalked upon a
door in a little back lane near a country church - my first church.
How young a child I may have been at the time I don't know, but it