“The guide that was leading the husband’s horse happened to glance back, and there was that poor young thing sitting up staring out over the precipice; and her face began to bend downward a little, and she put up her two hands slowly and met it—­so,—­and put them flat against her eyes—­so—­and then she sank out of the saddle, with a sharp shriek, and one caught only the flash of a dress, and it was all over.”

Then after a pause: 

“Ah, yes, that guide saw these things—­yes, he saw them all.  He saw them all, just as I have told you.”

After another pause: 

“Ah, yes, he saw them all.  My God, that was me. 
I was that guide!”

This had been the one event of the old man’s life; so one may be sure he had forgotten no detail connected with it.  We listened to all he had to say about what was done and what happened and what was said after the sorrowful occurrence, and a painful story it was.

When we had wound down toward the valley until we were about on the last spiral of the corkscrew, Harris’s hat blew over the last remaining bit of precipice—­a small cliff a hundred or hundred and fifty feet high—­and sailed down toward a steep slant composed of rough chips and fragments which the weather had flaked away from the precipices.  We went leisurely down there, expecting to find it without any trouble, but we had made a mistake, as to that.  We hunted during a couple of hours—­not because the old straw hat was valuable, but out of curiosity to find out how such a thing could manage to conceal itself in open ground where there was nothing left for it to hide behind.  When one is reading in bed, and lays his paper-knife down, he cannot find it again if it is smaller than a saber; that hat was as stubborn as any paper-knife could have been, and we finally had to give it up; but we found a fragment that had once belonged to an opera-glass, and by digging around and turning over the rocks we gradually collected all the lenses and the cylinders and the various odds and ends that go to making up a complete opera-glass.  We afterward had the thing reconstructed, and the owner can have his adventurous lost-property by submitting proofs and paying costs of rehabilitation.  We had hopes of finding the owner there, distributed around amongst the rocks, for it would have made an elegant paragraph; but we were disappointed.  Still, we were far from being disheartened, for there was a considerable area which we had not thoroughly searched; we were satisfied he was there, somewhere, so we resolved to wait over a day at Leuk and come back and get him.

Then we sat down to polish off the perspiration and arrange about what we would do with him when we got him.  Harris was for contributing him to the British Museum; but I was for mailing him to his widow.  That is the difference between Harris and me:  Harris is all for display, I am all for the simple right, even though I lose money by it.  Harris argued in favor of his proposition against mine, I argued in favor of mine and against his.  The discussion warmed into a dispute; the dispute warmed into a quarrel.  I finally said, very decidedly: