Here they
sat, smoking and being smoked, till they were dry and warm. Of course,
in case of a slip or an inadvertent movement, they would have gone
sprawling into the fire. A well-known Swiss botanist, who has seen many
strange sleeping-places in the course of sixty years of flower-hunting
in the mountains of Vaud and Valais, has told me that on one occasion he
had reached with great difficulty the only chalet in the neighbourhood
of his day's researches, at a late hour of the night, the whole mountain
being soaked with rain. It was a little upland chalet, which the people
had deserted for the autumn and winter; and meantime a mud avalanche had
taken possession, and covered the floor to a depth of several inches. No
plank was to be found for lying on; but he discovered a broken
one-legged stool, and on this he sat and slept, propped as well as might
be in a corner. It is difficult to say which would be worse--a fall from
the stool by daylight into the embers of a wood fire, or the shuddering
slimy waking about midnight, after a nod more vigorous than the rest, to
find oneself plunged in eight cold inches of soft mud.
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