VII. MACUGNAGA 375

morning, and peering all the rest of the day into the shadowy corners of chapel and sacristy and palace-corridor, beside every narrow street that was paved with waves, my strength began to fail fast. Couttet got anxious, and looked more gravely every morning into my eyes. “Ç’a ne va pas bien,” said he. “Vous ne le sentirez pas à présent, mais vous le sentirez après.” I finished my list, however,-pasted my brown paper into some rude likeness of the picture,-and packed up colours and note-books finally for a rapid run home; when, as so often happens in the first cessation of an overstrain, the day after leaving Venice I was stopped at Padua by a sharp fit of nervous fever.

145. I call it “nervous,” not knowing what else to call it,-for there was no malarian taint or other malignity in it, but only quick pulse, and depressed spirit, and the nameless ailing of overwearied flesh. Couttet put me to bed instantly, and went out to buy some herb medicines,-which Paduan physicians are wise enough yet to keep,-and made me some tisane, and bade me be patient, and all would be well. And, indeed, next day I was up, in armchair; but not allowed to stir out of the extremely small back room of the old inn, which commanded view only of a few deep furrowed tiles and a little sky. I sent out George to see if he could find some scrap of picture to hang on the blank wall; and he brought me a seven-inch-square bit of fifteenth-century tempera, a nameless saint with a scarlet cloak and an embossed nimbus, who much comforted me.

I was able to travel in a day or two; but the mental depression, with some weakness of limb, remained, all across Lombardy, as far as Vogogna, where a frosty morning glittered on the distant Simplon; and though I could not walk up the pass of Gondo, there was no more sadness in me, afterwards, than I suffered always in leaving either Italy or the Alps.

146. Which, however, in its own kind, became acute

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