Probably they had never been so appealed to before.  When my friend had finished speaking, silence, broken only by a few half-audible whispers, fell on the group.  I began to fear that, after all, he had been either misinformed or misunderstood, and was preparing to help him out with an explanation to the best of my ability, when a man sitting in the chimney-corner rose and said that, if we pleased, he would fetch the grandsons of the original seer, who would give us the fullest information possible on the subject of our inquiry.  This announcement was encouraging, and we assented with joy.  He left the chalet, and shortly afterwards returned with two stalwart and intelligent-looking men of about thirty and thirty-five respectively, accompanied by a couple of St Bernards, the most magnificent dogs I had ever seen.  I was reassured instantly, for the faces of these two peasants were certainly not those of rogues or fools.  They advanced to the centre of the assembly, now numbering some twenty persons, men and women, and were duly introduced to us by our host as Theodor and Augustin Raoul.  A wooden bench by the hearth was accorded them, the great dogs couched at their feet, pipes were lit here and there among the circle; and the scene, embellished by the ruddy glow of the flaming pine-logs, the unfamiliar costume of the peasantry, the quaint furniture of the chalet-kitchen in which we sat, and enhanced by the strange circumstances of our journey and the yet stranger story now recounted by the two Raouls, became to my mind every moment more romantic and unworld-like.  But the intent and strained expression of St. Aubyn’s features as he bent eagerly forward, hanging as if for life or death on the words which the brothers poured forth, reminded me that, in one respect at least, the spectacle before me presented a painful reality, and that for this desolate and lonely man every word of the Christmas tale told that evening was pregnant with import of the deepest and most serious kind.  Here, in English guise, is the legend of the Alpine seer, recounted with much gesticulation and rugged dramatic force by his grandsons, the younger occasionally interpolating details which the elder forgot, confirming the data, and echoing with a sonorous interjection the exclamations of the listeners.

Augustin Franz Raoul, the grandfather of the men who addressed us, originally differed in no respect, save that of blindness, from ordinary people.  One Christmas Eve, as the day drew towards twilight, and a driving storm of frozen snow raged over the mountains, he, his dog Hans, and his mule were fighting their way home up the pass in the teeth of the tempest.  At a turn of the road they came on a priest carrying the Viaticum to a dying man who inhabited a solitary but in the valley below.  The priest was on foot, almost spent with fatigue, and bewildered by the blinding snow which obscured the pathway and