Joseph humm'd and ha'ed for some time; but gratitude for the tipple, my admiration for Hofer, and, perhaps, the knowledge that I had been over some of the stiffest bits of the surrounding ranges _solus_, and had been after the gems, though unsuccessfully, before, made him relent, and it was finally settled that I should go. He went home to get comfortably steady for the next morning, and I laid violent hands on every thing eatable to stuff into my knapsack; whilst the others, after vainly trying to persuade me out of my determination, retired, shaking hands with me as if I was ordered for execution at eight precisely the next morning. Whereupon I vanished into the wooden box, which it is _de règle_ to get into in that part of the world when one wants to sleep, and slumbered incontinently. I had been asleep about five minutes, according to my own computation, though, in fact, it was as many hours, when I suddenly awoke to a full perception of the fact that I was "in for it." Alas, those treacherous fumes of "Slibowitz" no longer deluded me into the idea that I was fully up to any existing mountain in the known world; that jumping a ten-foot crevasse was as easy as taking a hurdle; or that climbing hand over hand up rocks "so perpendicular" that one's nose scraped against their stony bosoms, was rather safer, if any thing, than taking sparrows' nests from the top of a stable ladder! However, the honor of England was at stake. Go I must. So I resigned myself to the certainty of breaking my only neck, and jumped up, thereby nearly dashing in the roof of my brain-pan against the top of my box, adding, most unnecessarily, another headache to the one I already possessed--and turned out. Unfortunately, there was no one awake to see my magnanimity; and it was too dark to see if there had been; so I groped my way down, with my upper garments on my arm. After "barking" my shins against stools and trestles, and being nearly eaten up by a big dog in the dark, I sallied out, preferring to make my morning ablutions in the clear but cold brunnen that plashed and sparkled on the little green before the door, to dipping the tip of my nose and the ends of my fingers into the pie-dish which had been considerately placed for my private use. How intensely beautiful that dawn was! with the pine-woods steeped in the deepest purple--here and there a faint, gauzy mist, looking self-luminous, marking the course of some mountain brook through the forest. The gray cliffs stood dark and silent on the opposite side of the stream, and one far-off snow-peak, just catching the faint reflected light of dawn, gleamed ghost-like and faint, like some spirit lingering on the forbidden confines of day.