he had failed to earn. How his great frame was nurtured in those
days he never knew; perhaps the giant mountains recognized some kin
in him and fed and strengthened him after their own fashion. Even his
gentleness was confounded with cowardice. "Dot vos de hardtest," he said
simply; "it is not goot to be opligit to half crush your brudder, ven he
would make a laugh of you to your sweetheart." The end came sooner than
he expected, and, oddly enough, through this sweetheart. "Gottlieb," she
said to him one day, "the English Fremde who stayed here last night met
me when I was carrying some of those beautiful flowers you gave me. He
asked me where they were to be found, and I told him only YOU knew. He
wants to see you; go to him. It may be luck to you." Rutli went. The
stranger, an English Alpine climber of scientific tastes, talked with
him for an hour. At the end of that time, to everybody's astonishment,
he engaged this hopeless idler as his personal guide for three months,
at the sum of five francs a day! It was inconceivable, it was unheard
of! The Englander was as mad as Gottlieb, whose intellect had always
been under suspicion! The schoolmaster pursed up his lips, the pastor
shook his head; no good could come of it; the family looked upon it as
another freak of Gottlieb's, but there was one big mouth less to feed
and more room in the kitchen, and they let him go. They parted from him
as ungraciously as they had endured his presence.

Then followed two months of sunshine in Rutli's life--association with
his beloved plants, and the intelligent sympathy and direction of a
cultivated man. Even in altitudes so dangerous that they had to take
other and more experienced guides, Rutli was always at his master's
side. That savant's collection of Alpine flora excelled all previous
ones; he talked freely with Rutli of further work in the future, and
relaxed his English reserve so far as to confide to him that the outcome
of their collection and observation might be a book. He gave a flower
a Latin name, in which even the ignorant and delighted Rutli could
distinguish some likeness to his own. But the book was never compiled.
In one of their later and more difficult ascents they and their two
additional guides were overtaken by a sudden storm. Swept from their
feet down an ice-bound slope, Rutli alone of the roped-together party
kept a foothold on the treacherous incline. Here this young Titan, with
bleeding fingers clenched i