door of his room and went out into what in America
would be called the entry, or hall. He found himself in a long corridor
paved with stone, and having broad stone staircases leading up and down
from it to the different stories. In one place there was a passage way
which led to a window that seemed to be on the back side of the hotel.
Rollo went there to look out, in order to see what the prospect might be
in that direction.

He saw first the gardens and grounds of the hotel, extending for a short
distance in the rear of the building, and beyond them he obtained
glimpses of a rapidly running stream. The water was very turbid. It
boiled and whirled incessantly as it swept swiftly along the channel.

"Ah," said Rollo, "that is the River Aar, I suppose, flowing through
Interlachen from one lake to the other. I thought I should see it
somewhere here; but I did not know whether it was before the hotels or
behind them."

A short distance beyond the stream Rollo saw the lower part of a
perpendicular precipice of gray rock. All except the lower part of this
precipice was concealed by the fogs and clouds, which seemed to settle
down so low upon the landscape in all directions as to conceal almost
every thing but the surface of the ground.

"I wonder how high that precipice is," said Rollo to himself.

"I wonder whether I could climb up to the top of it," he continued,
still talking to himself, "if I could only find some way to get across
the river? There must be some way, I suppose. Perhaps there is a
bridge."

Rollo then turned his eye upward to look at the clouds. In one place
there seemed to be a break among them, and the fleecy masses around the
break were slowly moving along. The place where Rollo was looking was
about the middle of the sky; that is, about midway between the horizon
and the zenith.[5] While Rollo was looking at this break, which seemed,
while he looked at it, to brighten up and open more and more, he saw
suddenly, to his utter amazement, a large green tree burst into view in
the midst of it, and then disappear again a moment afterwards as a fresh
mass of cloudy vapor drifted over. Rollo was perfectly bewildered with
astonishment. To see a green tree, clear and distinct in form and bright
with the beams of the sun which just at that instant caught upon it,
breaking out to view suddenly high up among the clouds of the sky,
seemed truly an astonishing spectacle. Rollo had scarcely recovered from
the fir