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Updated: June 27, 2025
"Ay, my true-hearted and pretty Swiss, this is well for thee who wilt affirm that a drop of thy snow-water is worth a thousand limpid springs, or thou art not the true child of old Melchior de Willading; but it is lost on the cooler head of one who has seen other lands.
But the vegetable mould does not cease to absorb water when it becomes saturated, for it then gives off a portion of its moisture to the mineral earth below, and thus is ready to receive a new supply; and, besides, the bed of leaves not yet converted to mould takes up and retains a very considerable proportion of snow-water, as well as of rain.
The natives who confine themselves to snow-water in the winter and drink of the small rivulets which flow through the plains in the summer are exempt from the attacks of this disease.
As he said, once listened rightly to, the music of the falling waters gave suggestions which, if they were sobering, were still not sad. This place was all our own, and hither we most frequently bent our steps on Sundays, after the snow-water had left the creek, and the danger of lurking colds had been coaxed from the earth by the May sun.
Not from the melting of the snow, for snow-water was cold, and this was always warm, winter and summer. For his own part he thought its source was a spring, heated by volcanic fires, and many others thought the same. Its depth was unknown; he himself had tried to fathom it with the longest line he could find, yet had never succeeded in touching ground.
Often we had to sit down in the blasted woods and rest awhile; often moisten our parched mouths at the runnels of snow-water that thridded the undergrowth. The shadows were slanting eastwards as we reached the clearing we had quitted some hours earlier, and the goats had disappeared.
"Know, friend Sancho," answered Don Quixote, "that the life of knights-errant is subject to a thousand dangers and reverses, and neither more nor less is it within immediate possibility for knights-errant to become kings and emperors, as experience has shown in the case of many different knights with whose histories I am thoroughly acquainted; and I could tell thee now, if the pain would let me, of some who simply by might of arm have risen to the high stations I have mentioned; and those same, both before and after, experienced divers misfortunes and miseries; for the valiant Amadis of Gaul found himself in the power of his mortal enemy Arcalaus the magician, who, it is positively asserted, holding him captive, gave him more than two hundred lashes with the reins of his horse while tied to one of the pillars of a court; and moreover there is a certain recondite author of no small authority who says that the Knight of Phoebus, being caught in a certain pitfall, which opened under his feet in a certain castle, on falling found himself bound hand and foot in a deep pit underground, where they administered to him one of those things they call clysters, of sand and snow-water, that well-nigh finished him; and if he had not been succoured in that sore extremity by a sage, a great friend of his, it would have gone very hard with the poor knight; so I may well suffer in company with such worthy folk, for greater were the indignities which they had to suffer than those which we suffer.
In the meantime, such as the winter had almost wholly spared, and who still retained some portion of courage, prepared their melancholy meal. It had consisted, ever since they left Smolensk, of some slices of horseflesh broiled, and a little rye-meal made into a sort of gruel with snow-water, or kneaded into paste, which they seasoned, for want of salt, with the powder of their cartridges.
We now emerged from the forest, when the ground above us appeared covered with spongy moss, the walking over which we found comparatively easy, saturated though it was with snow-water, which fell in every direction in tiny cascades over the side of the mountain.
They piled off the train at Sawyer's, stamped their feet on the board platform of the station, shouldered their "turkeys," and straggled off down the tote-road. It was an eighteen-mile walk in. The ground had loosened its frost. The footing was ankle-deep in mud and snow-water. Next morning, bright and early, the breaking of the rollways began.
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