XI. L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC 441

on that, however, of course, with every crevasse hidden; and nobody at the cabane yet, so we took Richard back to the first couloir, showed him how to use foot and pole, to check himself if he went too fast, or got head-foremost; and we slid down the two thousand feet to the source of the Arveron, in some seven or eight minutes;* Richard vouchsafing his entire approval of that manner of progression by the single significant epithet, “Pernicious!”

It was the last of our winter walks together. Richard did not die, like Charles,¹ but he went on the Stock Exchange;² married a wife, very nice and pretty; then grew rich; held a rich man’s faiths in political economy; and bought bad prints of clipper packets in green sea; and so we gradually gave each other up-with all good wishes on both sides. But Richard, having no more winter walks, became too fat and well liking when he was past fifty-and did die, then; to his sister’s great surprise and mine. The loss of him broke her heart, and she soon followed him.

212. During her forty-five or fifty years of life, Eliza Fall (had she but been named Elizabeth instead, I should have liked her ever so much better,) remained an entirely worthy and unworldly girl and woman, of true service and counsel always to her brother and me; caring for us both much more than she was cared for;-to my mother an affectionate and always acceptable, calling and chatting, friend: capable and intelligent from her earliest youth, nor without graceful fancy and rational poetic power. She wrote far better verses than ever I did, and might have drawn well, but had always what my mother called “perjinketty”³

* Including ecstatic or contemplative rests: of course one goes much faster than 200 feet a minute, on good snow, at an angle of 30.

¹ [Charles Richardson: see above, p. 137.]

² [This is not quite correct. Richard Whiteman Fall became a partner in the mercantile house of Palmer, Mackillop, Dent & Co.; he was of literary and artistic tastes; a lover, too, of the Thames and Severn, of which rivers he knew every mile; he died in 1878 at the age of fifty-six.]

³ [Perjink (origin unknown)= exact, prim, neat; given by Jamieson (Scottish Dictionary, 1880, vol. iii. p. 475) as a Fife word; he suggests the derivation parjoinct (= accurately joined).]

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