As for me, I did not feel like disputing his susceptibility.  I was suffering an uneasy apprehension of an avalanche—­not of snow, but of trunks and boxes from the topheavy diligences ahead of us.  However, we reached the top of Mont Cenis safely by means of thirteen mules to each coach, attached tandem, and we stopped at the queer relay-house there some thirty minutes.  Here some women in the garb of nuns served me some soup with grated cheese, a compound which suggested a dishcloth in flavor, yet it was very good.  I will not attempt to reconcile the two statements.  After the soup I went out to see the Alps.  The ecstatic Briton was still eating and drinking, and I could enjoy the scene unmolested.  I crossed a little bridge near the inn.  The night was cold and bright.  Hundreds of snowy peaks above, below and in every direction, some of their hoary heads lost in the clouds, were glistening in the light of a clear September moon, and the stillness was only broken by a wild stream tumbling down the precipices which I looked up to as I crossed the bridge.  It was indeed an impressive scene—­cold, desolate, awful.  I walked so near the freezing cataract that the icicles touched my face, and thinking that Dante, when he wrote his description of hell, might have been inspired by this very scene, I wrapped my cloak closer about me and went back to the inn.

The diligences were ready, and we commenced a descent which I cannot even now think of without a shudder.  To each of those heavily-laden stages were attached two horses only, and we bounded down the mountain-side like a huge loosened boulder.  Imagine the sensation as you looked out of the windows and saw yourself whirling over yawning chasms and along the brinks of dizzy precipices, fully convinced that the driver was drunk and the horses goaded to madness by Alpine demons!  I have been on the ocean in a storm sufficiently severe to make Jew and Christian pray amicably together; I have been set on fire by a fluid lamp, and have been dragged under the water by a drowning friend, but I think I never had such an alarming sense of coming destruction as in that diligence.  I think of those sure-footed horses even now with gratitude.

We arrived at Susa a long time before daylight.  At first, I decided to stay and see this town, which was founded by a Roman colony in the time of Augustus.  The arch built in his honor about eight years before Christ seemed a thing worth going to see; but a remark from my companion with the eye-glass made me determine to go on.  He said he was going to “do” the arch, and I knew I should not be equal to witnessing any more of his ecstasies.

My first astonishment in Italy was that hardly any of the railroad officials spoke French.  I had always been told that with that language at your command you could travel all over the Continent.  This is a grave error:  even in Florence, although “Ici on parle francais” is conspicuous in many shop-windows, I found I had to speak Italian or go unserved.  I had a mortal dread of murdering the beautiful Italian language; so I wanted to speak it well before I commenced, like the Irishman who never could get his boots on until he had worn them a week.