The village lies in a curiously open plain, with a girdle of hills, in one of which the glacieres were supposed to lie.  The first auberge refused us admittance, on the ground that the dinner was all pre-engaged, and the result was that we found a pleasanter place higher up the village, near a vast new maison de ville with every window shattered by recent hail.  The people groaned over the unnecessary expense of this huge building, which might well, from its size, have been a home for the whole village; and they told us that the communal forests had been terribly over-cut to provide the money for it.  Our first demand was for food; our next, for a guide to the glacieres.  Food we could have; but why should we wish to go to the glacieres, when there was so much else worth seeing at a little distance?—­a guide might without doubt be found, but there was nothing to be seen when we got there.  We ordered prompt dinner, anything that happened to be ready, and desired the landlord to look out for a man to show us the way up the hills.  When the dinner came, it was cold; and the main dish consisted apparently of something which had made stock for many generations of soup, and had then been kept in a half-warm state, ready to be heated for any passer-by who called for hot meat, till the cook had despaired of its ever being used, and had allowed it to become cold:  at least, no other supposition seemed to account for its utter want of flavour, and the wonderful development of its fibres.  As a matter of politeness, I asked the man what it was; when he took the dish from the table, smelled at it, and pronounced it veal.

There were also several specimens of the original old turnip-radish, with large shrubs of heads, and mature feelers many inches long.  As all this was not very inviting, we ordered an omelette and some cheese; and when the omelette came, we found that the cook had combined our ideas and understood our order to mean a cheese-omelette, which was not so bad after all.

By this time, the landlord’s visit to his drinking-room had procured a man willing to act as our guide.  He was, unfortunately, more willing than able; for his sojourn in the drinking-room had told upon his powers of equilibrium.  He asserted, as every one seemed in all cases to assert, that neither rope nor axe was in any way necessary.  When I pressed the rope, he said that if monsieur was afraid he had better not go; so we told the landlord privately that the man was rather too drunk for a guide, and we must have another.  The landlord thereupon offered himself, at the suggestion of his wife, who seemed to be the chief partner in the firm, and we were glad to accept his offer; while the incapacitated man whom we had rejected acquiesced in the new arrangement with a bow so little withering, and with such genuine politeness, that, in spite of his over-much wine, he won my heart.  The landlord himself did not profess to know the glacieres; but he knew the man who lived nearest to them, and proposed to lead us to his friend’s chalet, whence we should doubtless be able to find a guide.