One, two, three, four, five. There were five of them.
Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of the Great St.
Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a
mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet
had time to sink into the snow.
This is not my simile. It was made for the occasion by the stoutest courier, who was a
German. None of the others took any more notice of it than they took of me, sitting on
another bench on the other side of the convent door, smoking my cigar, like them, and -
also like them - looking at the reddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the
bodies of belated travellers, dug out of it, slowly wither away, knowing no corruption in
that cold region.
The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; the mountain became white; the
sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose; and the air turned piercing cold. The five couriers
buttoned their rough coats. There being no safer man to imitate in all such proceedings
than a courier, I buttoned mine.
The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a conversation. It is a sublime
sight, likely to stop conversation. The mountain being now out of the sunset, they
resumed. Not that I had heard any part of their previous discourse; for indeed, I had not
then broken away from the American gentleman, in the travellers' parlour of the convent,
who, sitting with his face to the fire, had undertaken to realise to me the whole progress
of events which had led to the accumulation by the Honourable Ananias Dodger of one of
the largest acquisitions of dollars ever made in our country.
'My God!' said the Swiss courier, speaking in French, which I do not hold (as some
authors appear to do) to be such an all- sufficient excuse for a naughty word, that I have
only to write it in that language to make it innocent; 'if you talk of ghosts - '
'But I DON'T talk of ghosts,' said the German.
'Of what then?' asked the Swiss.
'If I knew of what then,' said the German, 'I should probably know a great deal more.'
It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious. So, I moved my position to that
corner of my bench which was nearest to them, and leaning my back against the convent
wall, heard perfectly, without appearing to attend.
'Thunder and lightning!' said the German, warming, 'when a certain man is coming to see
you, unexpectedly; and, without his own knowledge, sends some invisible messenger, to
