24th july - modestine
beginning:
In 1878, on something of a whim, the novelist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson crossed southern France’s Cévennes mountains, one of the wildest and most sparsely populated parts of the country, in the company of a slow-moving donkey named Modestine.
middle:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/travel/cevennes-france-drive.html
ending:
Stevenson evinced a similar sentimentality after he sold Modestine at the end of his walk and boarded a coach to begin his journey home. “It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver … that I became aware of my bereavement,” he wrote. “I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but now she was gone.”
there's a reason why a writer's a writer. that final sentence... gold.