MihaElla ’s Reviews > Travel With A Donkey In The Cevennes: By Robert Louis Stevenson > Status Update

All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful.

“The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God’s green caravanserai.
OLD PLAY.”

it is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?

‘No,’ I said, ‘a Scotsman.’

It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

They told me when I started,& was ready to believe it,that before a few days I should come to love Modestine like a dog.Three days had passed,we had shared some misadventures,& my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my beast of burden.She was pretty enough to look at;but then she had given proof of dead stupidity,redeemed indeed by patience,but aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness

It was wild weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of the east. The sun sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.

When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in the kitchen combing out her daughter’s hair;and I made her my compliments upon its beauty.
Oh no, said the mother;it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.Look, it is too fine.
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical circumstances,&,by a startling democratic process,the defects of the majority decide the type of beauty

I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!

But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.