“Tutor, Monsieur?  The poor young gentleman has a tutor and a duenna in Innocentina.  I wish him joy of her.”

“I wish her joy of him,” said I, remembering my wrongs.  But soon I forgot them and all other troubles past and present, in surrendering my spirit to the glory of the scene.  Joseph had his triumph, for the surprise he had kept up his sleeve was out at last.  St. Bernard had me at his feet, and held me there.  The wild and gloomy splendour of the Pass struck at my heart, and fired my imagination.  Even the Simplon had nothing like this to give.  The Simplon at its finest sang a paean to civilisation; it glorified the science of engineering, and told you that it was a triumph of modernity.  But this strange, unkempt Pass, with its inadequate road,—­now overhanging a sheer precipice, now dipping down steeply towards the wild bed of its sombre river,—­this Great St. Bernard, seemed a secret way back into other centuries, savage and remote.  I felt shame that I had patronised it earlier, with condescending admiration of some prettinesses.  No wonder that Joseph had smiled and held his peace, knowing what was to come.  There was the old road, the Roman road, along which Napoleon had led his staggering thousands.  There were his forts, scarcely yet crumbled into ruin.  I saw the army, a straggling procession of haggard ghosts, following always, and falling as they followed, enacting again for me the passing scene of death and anguish.  I was one of the men.  I struggled on, because Napoleon needed all his soldiers.  Then weakness crushed me, like a weight of iron.  A mist before my eyes shut out the opposite precipice with its sparse pines, and flashing waterfalls, the mountain heights beyond, and the merciless blue sky.  This was death.  Who cared?  The echo of thirty thousand feet was in my ears as they passed on, leaving me to die by the roadside, as I had left others before.

I started, and waked from my dream.  It was a joyful shock to see Joseph beside me, in the homely clothes which had replaced his “Sunday best”; to see Finois and his pack full of my friendly belongings.  But I clung to the comfortable present for a few moments only.  The spell of dead centuries had me in its grip.  Farther and farther back into the land of dead days, I journeyed with St. Bernard, and helped him found the monastery which the eyes of my flesh had not yet seen.  The eyes of my spirit saw the place, the nerves of my spirit felt the chill of its remoteness.  And even when I waked again, I could not be sure that I was Montagu Lane, an idle young man of the twentieth century, who had come for the gratification of a whim to this fastness where greater men had ventured in peril and self-sacrifice.

Imagination is the one possession having which no man can be poor, or mean, or insignificant.  He can walk with kings, and he can see the high places of the world with seeing eyes, a gift which no money can give; and yet he will have to suffer as those without imagination never can suffer or picture others suffering.