ch I myself once felt in the Pyrenees, which gave me
very solemn thoughts after a while, though at first I did nothing but
laugh at it; and I will tell you why.

I was travelling in the Pyrenees; and I came one evening to the loveliest
spot--a glen, or rather a vast crack in the mountains, so narrow that
there was no room for anything at the bottom of it, save a torrent
roaring between walls of polished rock. High above the torrent the road
was cut out among the cliffs, and above the road rose more cliffs, with
great black cavern mouths, hundreds of feet above our heads, out of each
of which poured in foaming waterfalls streams large enough to turn a
mill, and above them mountains piled on mountains, all covered with woods
of box, which smelt rich and hot and musky in the warm spring air. Among
the box-trees and fallen boulders grew hepaticas, blue and white and red,
such as you see in the garden; and little stars of gentian, more azure
than the azure sky. But out of the box-woods above rose giant silver
firs, clothing the cliffs and glens with tall black spires, till they
stood out at last in a jagged saw-edge against the purple evening sky,
along the mountain ranges, thousands of feet aloft; and beyond them
again, at the head of the valley, rose vast cones of virgin snow, miles
away in reality, but looking so brilliant and so near that one fancied at
the first moment that one could have touched them with one's hand. Snow-
white they stood, the glorious things, seven thousand feet into the air;
and I watched their beautiful white sides turn rose-colour in the evening
sun, and when he set, fade into dull cold gray, till the bright moon came
out to light them up once more. When I was tired of wondering and
admiring, I went into bed; and there I had a dream--such a dream as Alice
had when she went into Wonderland--such a dream as I dare say you may
have had ere now. Some noise or stir puts into your fancy as you sleep a
whole long dream to account for it; and yet that dream, which seems to
you to be hours long, has not taken up a second of time; for the very
same noise which begins the dream, wakes you at the end of it: and so it
was with me. I dreamed that some English people had come into the hotel
where I was, and were sleeping in the room underneath me; and that they
had quarrelled and fought, and broke their bed down with a tremendous
crash, and that I must get up, and stop the fight; and at that moment I
woke