Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Volume IV

ESSAYS OF THE ROAD, ETC.
of frost. I went up into the sloping garden behind
the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the
tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry
cabbages and cauliflowers that had been spoiled by
caterpillars. She had been so much pleased in the
summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered
over by white butterflies. And now, look at the
end of it ! She could nowise reconcile this with her
moral sense. And, indeed, unless these butterflies
are created with a side-look to the composition of
improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to
decide intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I
fell into a long and abstruse calculation with my
landlord ; having for object to compare the distance
driven by him during eight years' service on the box
of the Wendover coach with the girth of the
round world itself. We tackled the question most
conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for
Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a
triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were
stayed by a small lacuna in my information. I did
not know the circumference of the earth. The land-
lord knew it, to be sure — plainly he had made the
same calculation twice and once before, — but he
wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the
moment I showed myself so poor a second seemed
to lose all interest in the result.
Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the
same valley with Great Missenden, but at the foot
of it, where the hills trend off on either hand like a
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