Know the glaciere?--yes, indeed! he had ice from it one year every
morning. His wife and he had made a _course_ to the campagne of M. the
Maire of Aviernoz, and he--the cafetier--had descended for miles, as it
were, down and down, till he came to an underground world of ice,
wonderful, totally wonderful: there he perceived so immense a cold, that
he drank a bottle of rhoom--a whole bottle--and drank it from the neck,
_a l'Anglaise_. And when they had gone so far that great dread came upon
them, they rolled a stone down the ice, and it went into the
darkness--boom, boom, boom,--and he put on a power of ventriloquism
which admirably represented the strange suggestive sound. Hold a moment!
had monsieur a crayon? Yes, monsieur had; so the things were impetuously
swept off a round marble table, and the excited little man drew a fancy
portrait of the glaciere. The way to reach it? Go by diligence to
Charvonnaz--exactly what I had determined upon--and walk up to Aviernoz,
where his good friend the maire would make me see his beautiful
glaciere, through the means of a letter which he went to write.
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