No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time—­ it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.  Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.  And now it went —

“O ma vieille Font-georges
Ou volent les rouges-gorges:” 

and again, to a more trampling measure —

“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitot qu’on entend le timbre
Des cymbales do Bivar.”

The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.  Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her “old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath—­on her knees, I think she said—­not to employ it otherwise.