Travelers Original Accounts Since 1 840 



once, a little puppet, running down the farther slope of the cable, i860 

 and growing a little and a little larger as he drew near. Presently owc * 

 one noticed that he had left his balancing pole behind, and was 

 tripping forward with outstretched arms. 



I stood where I could see him well, on his return, and I looked 

 at him with something of the interest one might feel in a man 

 who had come back from the dead and had put on his earthly 

 personality again. I do not remember his face, which was no 

 doubt as good or as bad a face as any mountebank's or mon- 

 arch's, but his feet seemed to me the very most intelligent feet in 

 the world, pliable, sinuous, clinging, educated in every fibre, and 

 full of spiritual sentience. They had the air of knowing that the 

 whole man was trusted to them, and, such as he was, that he 

 was in their power and keeping alone. They rose and fell upon 

 the cable with an exquisite accuracy, and a delicate confidence 

 which had nothing foolhardy in it. Blondin's head might take 

 risks, but it was clear that Blondin's feet took none; whatever 

 they did they did wittingly, and with a full forecast of the chances 

 and consequences. They were imaginably such feet as Isaac 

 Taylor conjectures we may have in another life, where the intel- 

 lect shall not be seated in the brain alone, but shall be issued to 

 every part of the body, and present in every joint and limb. 



They were an immense consolation to me, those feet, and 

 when Blondin went tripping gayly out upon them over his rope 

 again, I breathed much more freely than I had before ; they had, 

 as it were, personally reassured me, and given me their honor 

 that nothing should happen to him; those feet and I had a sort 

 of common understanding about him, and I do not think they 

 respected him any more than I did for risking his life in that 

 manner. He went down the rope and up the rope dwindling 

 from a pink man to a pink puppet as before, and going to nothing 

 in the crowd. Then he came to something once more, and began 

 to grow from a puppet into a man again, but with something odd 

 about him. He had resumed his balancing pole, and he had 

 something strange on his feet, those wise feet, and, as he drew 



291 



