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.

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!

It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits;

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.