We walked back to the Soothsayer’s bolshevized car, which waited at the turning of the drive where a Revolutionary scuffle took place between American troops and a detachment of redcoats under a commander of the fine old British name of Knyphausen. As we whirred down to the Lincoln Drive and I commented on the lavender haze that overhung the steep slopes of the glen, the Soothsayer said: “Ah, but you should have seen it two weeks ago. The trees were like a cashmere shawl!” I shall have to wait fifty weeks before I can see the Wissahickon in a way that will content the fastidious Soothsayer. Christopher Morley, _Travels in Philadelphia_. By permission of the author and David McKay Company. TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON I. OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS--FATHER APOLLINARIS Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order. The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and, as I began to see, it would insure stability, blow high, blow low. But it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects along the line of march. My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais and Gévaudan. The Hills of Gévaudan on the right were a little more naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in Gévaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready-built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the sonnet into _patois_: “Mountains and vales and floods, heard Ye that whistle?”