ecks to look at him, and bothered with ten thousand
questions. He told King that the tourists made his life miserable;
they were a great deal worse than the blizzards in the winter. And the
government, he said, does not take this into account in his salary.

Occasionally there was an alarm that the mist was getting thin, that the
clouds were about to break, and a rush was made out-of-doors, and the
tourists dispersed about on the rocks. They were all on the qui vine to
see the hotel or the boarding-house they had left in the early morning.
Excursionists continually swarmed in by rail or by carriage road. The
artist, who had one of his moods for wanting to see nature, said there
were too many women; he wanted to know why there were always so many
women on excursions. "You can see nothing but excursionists; whichever
way you look, you see their backs." These backs, looming out of the
mist, or discovered in a rift, seemed to enrage him.

At length something actually happened. The curtain of cloud slowly
lifted, exactly as in a theatre; for a moment there was a magnificent
view of peaks, forests, valleys, a burst of sunshine on the lost world,
and then the curtain dropped, amid a storm of "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and
intense excitement. Three or four times, as if in response to the call
of the spectators, this was repeated, the curtain lifting every time
on a different scene, and then it was all over, and the heavy mist
shut down on the registered and the unregistered alike. But everybody
declared that they preferred it this way; it was so much better to have
these wonderful glimpses than a full view. They would go down and brag
over their good-fortune.

The excursionists by-and-by went away out of the clouds, gliding
breathlessly down the rails. When snow covers this track, descent is
sometimes made on a toboggan, but it is such a dangerous venture that
all except the operatives are now forbidden to try it. The velocity
attained of three and a half miles in three minutes may seem nothing
to a locomotive engineer who is making up time; it might seem slow to a
lover whose sweetheart was at the foot of the slide; to ordinary mortals
a mile a minute is quite enough on such an incline.

Our party, who would have been much surprised if any one had called
them an excursion, went away on foot down the carriage road to the Glen
House. A descent of a few rods took them into the world of light and
sun, and they were soon beyond the littl