up through the mass of snow, sometimes scarcely showing a few feet above the ground, though our road so far had been dug out and beaten hard, and the travelling was by no means bad: but suddenly it came to an end, winter reasserted itself, and the snow had it all its own way. We dismounted, fastened on with great care spectacles and masks, the men following our example, and arranging their veils and glasses, and then busying themselves in transferring the horses to the sledges, which were lying by the side of the road, fastening the seats from our bergwagen on to the slight wooden framework of the runners. We watched, meanwhile, with much amusement, a drove of small black pigs who were disporting themselves on the snow, being ignominiously captured by a leg or an ear, and tossed into a cart, where they subsided into a most uncomfortable heap, with shrieks guttural and expostulatory.

The sledges were soon prepared, and we mounted to our places, D. and E., under Walther's care, heading the procession. They were very well off, the guide having fastened the seat of his bergwagen bodily, by means of cords, to the runners, so that they had something to cling to besides each other. Mrs. C. and C. were not so fortunate, they being enthroned on a long box, sitting back to back, with a loose cross-board for the feet, and nothing particular to lay hold of. A few yards brought us to the place where a gang of labourers were at work cutting out the roadway; unfortunately they had begun laterally, and a great slice of hard snow was already gone, leaving only a narrow ledge or shelf, not wide enough for our carriages. But the peasants were good-natured, and willing to put their shoulders to the wheel; that is to say (having a strict regard to truth), they held up the runners on one side to prevent our toppling over; and that difficulty past, we dashed on in famous style. The workmen, with their veiled faces and goggle eyes, standing silently in the dismal trenches, looked like a troop of weird ghosts, who had somehow strayed from the Inferno, and were fated to dig their way down again into the darkness, while we mere earthly travellers passed on into higher air.

The horses rushed over the snow, and flung up the cold white masses into our faces, pelting us with snow-balls with their eager feet; a man stood behind each sledge balanced between the runners, and drove over our heads, with shout and song urging on the horses. Whenever we dared to turn our heads the sight was one never to be forgotten: C. and her companion, in an agony of terror and laughter, holding on by the strength of a fixed determination, and looking out despairingly for side jolts which might upset their equilibrium. A joyful shout reached us, and Mrs. C. announced that she had found a rope to hold by, and was very comfortable: a short-lived happiness, as the next moment she discovered she had been clinging to her own crinoline, from which no difficulties of the way had ever separated her.

We went on and on, the only moving things in that beautiful still snow world, except one little marmot, who raced away in the distance,

uttering his shrill cry; a lake lay near us, but so covered over that only here and there a green glimmer of ice was to be seen. The mountains were entirely veiled, the great gallery on the Italian side was roofed with snow, which was piled up within and about it. Here our expedition ended, as we did not wish to give our poor horses a toilsome ascent; so dismounting, we walked down the hill, and plunged into the soft bank beside the road, gaining the entrance to the first arches in order to see the immense icicles that fringed them, and then prepared to return in different order, D. being anxious to try her power of keeping her place on the wooden box. The pace was glorious, and it was the greatest possible fun to spin along through the snow-great hard masses balling under us, and throwing sledge, and seat, and travellers suddenly from side to side, as we dashed round corners, half blinded by the dazzling brightness; the cold and the speed at which we went taking away our breath with almost a terror of delight. Writing now in a warm quiet English home, such raptures sound too foolish to repeat, but our enjoyment was ecstatic while it lasted, our sensations so entirely new, except in so far as old childish dreams came back of wonderful Siberian journeys, and tales of adventure with dogs and reindeer. And then it was our own escapade, and had not been "cut and dried," and arranged for us by the powers that be! There had not been such a season for thirty years, and there might never be another when such an expedition could be made in June. Of course, there could never be another; of that we felt quite sure, and we laughed in our content, like a rabid connoisseur who hugs himself in silent delight over the contemplation of a rare engraving, knowing that the plate has been destroyed.

Our day was unique,—a beautiful completeness, which could only live again in our memories.

And then there was the dinner. Other people may come to that little inn, and may dine there, but not with such appetites as ours. And again fortune favoured us; there had been a wedding on the Sunday, and the remains of the feast graced the board. In romantic descriptions of the highest class it is inadmissible to speak of a table simply as such; whatever may be the number of its legs, whether it be round or square or oblong, it invariably becomes a board and generally groans; and this practice probably originated the first idea of mahogany as a spiritual habitat; it may to many minds afford a triumphant refutation of the notions of idle cavillers who profess to regard the legends of Tintagel as vague myths, that the knights of King Arthur invariably met at a table, the use of that simple word conveying a sense of remote antiquity, and a quaint rudeness of expression, bearing, by all rules of criticism, a genuine stamp of truth that must be perfectly irresistible! Fancy an erection of spun sugar and a bouquet of roses in a little wainscoted salon, through the windows of which we looked out on nothing but the same dream of That sugar temple and the flowers added the element of poetry

snow.

to the adventure which was lacking in our prosaic and realistic minds. We grew sentimental with the good Wirthin over their festivities, and rested and talked and fraternized with the bright-faced domestics, examined the kitchen, and saw that our men were well cared for; and then, just as a lazy content was stealing over us, and even a somnolent tendency had manifested itself in Mrs. C., we were summoned by Walther and his companion, who carried the small sledges slung by ropes over their shoulders. These are less than a yard long, and about eighteen inches in width, and are formed of small transverse pieces of wood, attached to iron runners, the rope being fastened to the front.

The men walked up a steep slope of snow, and we plodded after them, with many stumbles in the soft mass. At last, landed on a piece of stone which offered sure footing, we prepared to start. Seating ourselves on the sledges, with our feet extended, we steered ourselves, and by a

vigorous dig with our heels could come to a stop at pleasure. At first, the men took the ropes and ran with us, but the sensation was horrible of being dragged into infinite space, with nothing earthly to hold to, but crumbling or melting snow. When, however, we took the reins into our own hands the whole thing was different, and became an indescribable pleasure a swift shooting through the air without sense of obstruction. I began to realize what a fine time, if they were only sentient, the arrows would have belonging to an archery club, where the members were not clever enough to hit anything. But that was the difficulty, the one flaw in the perfect enjoyment of our performance; there was an end to it.

As a Frenchman once graphically remarked:-"Dans une chute il y a deux moments terribles: le départ et l'arrivée. Le voyage en luimême n'est rien. On cite même un maçon qui, tombant d'une cinquième étage, adressait au ciel, pendant la traversée, cette fervente prière: Mon Dieu, pourvu que ça dure !'"'

The sun had considerable power, and it was hard work to struggle up to the starting-post, marked by an alpenstock, preparatory to each fresh glissade. At last, fairly exhausted, E. took refuge with Mrs. C., who had camped out on a damp piece of grass, a wholesome dread of wet feet having made all our descriptions of delight fall heedlessly on her ears. For a few minutes longer D. and C. ran races against each other, a sudden unlucky turn of the foot bringing up now one, now the other, as a very bad second, in a snow-drift, while the winner was often precipitated most ingloriously into the cold soft mass at the bottom of the slope.

The hours had passed so pleasantly that we hardly realized how rapidly the shadows were lengthening, till the bergwagen were announced to be ready, and it was time to turn our faces homewards. Contented and weary, we were glad to find ourselves once more rattling down the road, and we reached our old quarters as a golden glow passing over the tops of the fir-trees, and shining through the tufts and branches of the great Arolla pines, left the earth in a cold, frosty twilight, settled down for a moment like a veil of light over the higher mountains, and then faded slowly into the pale clear greenness of the evening sky.

We spent more than ten days at Pontresina, the pleasantest possible headquarters for mountaineers or for ladies. The valley is at an elevation. of nearly six thousand feet, and the air is deliciously fresh and bracing, even in July; and early as we were there, with sunshine and fine weather, the cold was very bearable and wonderfully invigorating. The history of each day would fill a long paper, and cannot be given here. A morning on the Morteratsch glacier, was among our pleasantest expeditions; the ice was in good order, comfortably crumbly on the surface, and affording us plenty of foothold. You may walk for miles over this great sea of dirty ice, which is anything but beautiful, as there are none of the

aiguilles which make the great charm of the Oberland glaciers, and very little colour. Here and there in a deep crevasse, one sees a tinge of soft sea-green, and the moulins, formed by little hidden streams forcing their way through the fissures, make an amusing variety in one's path; but as a whole, it is decidedly dull. At least, I can only write of it as we found it, and we may be told that "as a whole" we did not see it, for truth obliges me to confess that wonderful descriptions of the beauty and grandeur of the ice-fall, "combining the solemnity of cathedral architecture and the fantastic decorations of a Chinese pagoda, Druidical beards and dripping caves gleaming with diamonds in the sunlight," have reached us from those who penetrated further than an inexorable fate allowed us to proceed. In our experience, the cracks in the ice were only a few inches apart, so there was nothing to jump over, and during our expedition it afforded such good foothold that there was no excuse for slipping. The amphitheatre of hills enclosing this great frozen sea has few rivals in grandeur, when, as we saw it, a great white mantle of snow sweeping from each summit, falls as in soft, noiseless folds, to meet the rugged mass of ice below. The little woods skirting the end of the glacier are full of beauty, and near by there is a waterfall that in any other place would alone be an object of pilgrimage. The water-meadows were like a brilliant flower-bed, gay with patches of gentians and forget-me-nots, masses of purple primulas, yellow pansies, and delicate little soldinella; and clustering round the stones and rocks were sweet-scented daphnes and white crocuses, which sprout up on the barest-looking ground a few hours after the snow has melted from its surface.

These meadows, and the woods which skirt them, had a wonderful charm for us. A broad river flowed through the midst, often spreading itself over the valley when the warm sun melted the snows, and when the waters drew back again into their stony channel, grass, and moss, and flowers sprang up on the instant into vivid life; the trees cast their twisted roots about the soil to hold it fast, binding it with gray lichens and little fir twigs, and a soft carpet of dead leaves from last year's store; and before the hay was grown and there could be the sweet summer scent of mown grass drying in the wind, there was everywhere a garden of flowers, golden and violet, with soft pink blooms, and the blue gentians with their bright little eyes; the stones were encrusted with orange and scarlet lichens, and gray fringes hung in festoons from the old trees; the ice in great billows and ridges came down into the grass, turning it back in long furrows in its steady advance year by year, and down the rocks rivulets of cold snow-water trickled from among the stones, bubbled up under the moss, and turned into a sudden cloud of spray as they sprang from any jutting crag into the river at their feet; and far above, as solemn sentinels, the great snow mountains closed around the valley. Days among the Alps, though full of commonplace adventure and merriment, and the prose of ordinary life a little caricatured, are rich in