shout aloud.

Before him, pinnacle after pinnacle towered up a mighty Alp, blazing in
the morning sun. Down through a black rift on its side wound a gleaming
glacier, which hurled its shattered ice crystals over a dark cliff,
into the deep profound blue of a lake, which stretched north and south,
studded with green woody islets, almost as far as the eye could see.
Toward the mountain the lake looked deep and gloomy, but, on the hither
side, showed many a pleasant yellow shallow, and sandy bay, while
between him and the lake lay a mile or so of park-like meadow land, in
the full verdure of winter. As he looked, a vast dislocated mass of ice
fell crashing from the glacier into the lake, and solved at once the
mystery of the noises he had heard the night before.

He descended into the happy valley, and found a small tribe of friendly
blacks, who had never before seen the face of white man, and who
supposed him to be one of their own tribe, dead long ago, who had come
back to them, renovated and beautified, from the other world. With
these he lived a pleasant slothful life, while four years went on,
forgetting all the outside world, till his horse was dead, his gun
rusted and thrown aside, and his European clothes long since replaced
by the skin of the opossum and the koala. He had forgotten his own
tongue, and had given up all thoughts of crossing again the desolate
barriers of snow which divided him from civilization, when a slight
incident brought back old associations to his mind, and roused him from
sleep.

In some hunting excursion he got a slight scratch, and, searching for
some linen to tie it up, found in his mi-mi an old waistcoat, which he
had worn when he came into the valley. In the lining, while tearing it
up, he found a crumpled paper, a note from his sister, written years
before, full of sisterly kindness and tenderness. He read it again and
again before he lay down, and the next morning, collecting such small
stock of provisions as he could, he started on the homeward track, and
after incredible hardships reached his station.

His brother-in-law tried in vain with a strong party to reach the lake,
but never succeeded. What mountain it was he discovered, or what river
is fed by the lake he lived on, no man knows to this day. Some say he
went mad, and lived in the ranges all the time, and that this was all a
mere madman's fancy. But, whether he was mad or not then, he is sane
enough now, and has married a