"Beware the pine-tree's withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!"
This was the peasant's last Good night;
A voice replied, far up the height,
Excelsior!

These three verses round out the picture. The venerable citizen warns
him against the Pass; pass privileges up that mountain have all been
suspended. A kind-hearted maiden tenders hospitalities of a most
generous nature, considering that she never saw the young man before.
Some people might even go so far as to say that she should have been
ashamed of herself; others, that Mr. Longfellow, in giving her away,
was guilty of an indelicacy, to say the least of it. Possibly she was
practicing up to qualify for membership on the reception committee the
next time the visiting firemen came to her town or when there was going
to be an Elks' reunion; so I for one shall not question her motives.
She was hospitable--let it go at that. The peasant couples with his
good-night message a reference to the danger of falling pine wood and
also avalanches, which have never been pleasant things to meet up with
when one is traveling on a mountain in an opposite direction.

All about him firelights are gleaming, happy families are gathered
before the hearthstone, and through the windows the evening yodel may be
heard percolating pleasantly. There is every inducement for the youth
to drop in and rest his poor, tired, foolish face and hands and thaw
out his knee joints and give the maiden a chance to make good on
that proposition of hers. But no, high up above timber line he has an
engagement with himself and Mr. Longfellow to be frozen as stiff as a
dried herring; and so, now groaning, now with his eye flashing, now with
a tear--undoubtedly a frozen tear--standing in the eye, now clarioning,
now sighing, onward and upward he goes:

At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
Excelsior!

I'll say this much for him: He certainly is hard to kill. He can stay
out all night in those clothes, with the thermometer below zero, and
at dawn still be able to chirp the only word that is left in his
vocabulary. He can't last forever though. There has to be a finish to
this lamentable fiasco sometime. We get it:

A traveler, by the faithful hound,
Half buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

Th