About nine miles from St. Nicholas we crossed a bridge over the raging torrent of the Visp, and came to a log strip of flimsy fencing which was pretending to secure people from tumbling over a perpendicular wall forty feet high and into the river.  Three children were approaching; one of them, a little girl, about eight years old, was running; when pretty close to us she stumbled and fell, and her feet shot under the rail of the fence and for a moment projected over the stream.  It gave us a sharp shock, for we thought she was gone, sure, for the ground slanted steeply, and to save herself seemed a sheer impossibility; but she managed to scramble up, and ran by us laughing.

We went forward and examined the place and saw the long tracks which her feet had made in the dirt when they darted over the verge.  If she had finished her trip she would have struck some big rocks in the edge of the water, and then the torrent would have snatched her downstream among the half-covered boulders and she would have been pounded to pulp in two minutes.  We had come exceedingly near witnessing her death.

And now Harris’s contrary nature and inborn selfishness were striking manifested.  He has no spirit of self-denial.  He began straight off, and continued for an hour, to express his gratitude that the child was not destroyed.  I never saw such a man.  That was the kind of person he was; just so he was gratified, he never cared anything about anybody else.  I had noticed that trait in him, over and over again.  Often, of course, it was mere heedlessness, mere want of reflection.  Doubtless this may have been the case in most instances, but it was not the less hard to bar on that account—­and after all, its bottom, its groundwork, was selfishness.  There is no avoiding that conclusion.  In the instance under consideration, I did think the indecency of running on in that way might occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad, that was sufficient—­he cared not a straw for my feelings, or my loss of such a literary plum, snatched from my very mouth at the instant it was ready to drop into it.  His selfishness was sufficient to place his own gratification in being spared suffering clear before all concern for me, his friend.  Apparently, he did not once reflect upon the valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall to me:  fishing the child out—­witnessing the surprise of the family and the stir the thing would have made among the peasants—­then a Swiss funeral—­then the roadside monument, to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it.  And we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal.  I was silent.  I was too much hurt to complain.  If he could act so, and be so heedless and so frivolous at such a time, and actually seem to glory in it, after all I had done for him, I would have cut my hand off before I would let him see that I was wounded.