They set to work to dry themselves after an original fashion.

The fire was little more than a collection of smouldering embers, confined within three stone walls about a foot high; so they took each a one-legged stool--_chaises des vaches_, or _chaise des montagnes_--and attached themselves to the stools by the usual leathern bands round the hips; then they cautiously planted the prods of the stools in the middle of the embers, maintaining an unstable equilibrium by resting their own legs on the top of the walls.

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.