to _La Brevine_, the
highest valley in the canton; but now we turned off abruptly up the
steeper face on the left hand, and in a very few minutes came upon a dry
wilderness of rock and grass, which we at once recognised as 'glaciere
country;' and when I told our guide that we must be near the place, he
replied by pointing to the trees round the mouth of the pit.

Shortly after we first left Couvet, a gaunt elderly female, with a
one-bullock char, had joined our party, and tried to bully us into
giving up the cave and going instead to a neighbouring summit, whence
she promised us a view of unrivalled extent and beauty. She told us that
there was nothing to be seen in the glaciere, and that it was a place
where people lost their lives. The guide said that was nonsense; but
she reduced him to silence by quoting a case in point. She said, too,
that if a man slipped and fell, there was nothing to prevent him from
going helplessly down a run of ice into a subterranean watercourse,
which would carry him for two or three leagues underground; and on this
head our boy had no counter-statement to make. She asserted that without
ladders it was utterly impossible to make the descent to the
commencement of the glaciere; and she vowed there was no ladder now, nor
had been for some time. Here the boy came in, stating that the cave
belonged to a mademoiselle of Neufchatel, who had a summer cottage at no
great distance, and loved to be supplied with ice during her residence
in the country, for which purpose she kept a sound ladder on the spot,
and had it removed in the winter that it might not be destroyed. There
was a circumstantial air about this statement which for the moment got
the better of the old woman; but she speedily recovered herself, and
repeated positively that there was no ladder of any description, adding,
somewhat inconsequently, that it was such a bad one, no Christian could
use it with safety. The boy retorted, that it was all very well for her
to run the glaciere down, as she lived near it, but for the world from a
distance it was a most wonderful sight; and, as for the ladder, he
happened to know that it was at this time in excellent preservation. The
event proved that in saying this he drew entirely upon his imagination.
It is, perhaps, only fair to suppose that they don't mean anything by
it, and it may be mere ignorance on their part; but the simple fact is,
that some of those Swiss rustics tell the most barefaced