whether they could
last much longer; but their powers of endurance were greater than he had
supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good
chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost
impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than
the flirtations--though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety--of
German housemaids and waiters.[65]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: See p. 258.]

[Footnote 56: Acta SS. Bolland. May 9.--If possessed of the
characteristics of his race--'tall and proud'--his activity belies the
first line of the old saying,

'Lang and lazy,
Little and loud;
Red and foolish,
Black and proud:'

though possibly the personal habits which a modern spirit loves to point
out, as the great essential of hermit-life, united with the family
characteristic of the early Seton to verify the last line of the
saying.]

[Footnote 57: _Bibl. Univ. de Geneve_, First Series, xxi. 113. See also
_Edinburgh Philosophical Journal_, viii. 290.]

[Footnote 58: _Philosophical Magazine_, Aug. 1829.]

[Footnote 59: Colonel Dufour guessed the elevation of the cave, in 1822,
at two-thirds the height of the Niesen, and forty years after, as
General Dufour, he published the result of the scientific survey of
Switzerland, which makes it 1,780 metres; so that his early guess was
not a bad one.]

[Footnote 60: There is a hint of something of this kind in an editorial
note in the _Journal des Mines_ (now _Annales des Mines_) of Prairial,
an. iv. pp. 71, 72, in connection with the glaciere near Besancon.]

[Footnote 61: M. Soret, who visited the Schafloch in September 1860, and
communicated his notes to M. Thury, speaks of many columns in this part
of the glaciere, where we found only two. 'L'un d'entre eux,' he says,
'presentait dans sa partie inferieure une petite grotte ou cavite, assez
grande pour qu'un homme put y entrer en se courbant.']

[Footnote 62: See also the note at the end of this chapter.]

[Footnote 63: 'Toute la couche superieure au plan de niveau passant par
le seuil etait chargee de brouillard; toute la couche inferieure a ce
niveau etait parfaitement limpide.' (_Thury_, p. 37.)]

[Footnote 64: Respectively, 32 deg..666, 36 deg..266, and 32 deg., Fahrenheit.]

[Footnote 65: Since I wrote this chapter, my attention has been called
to a tourist's account of the Schafloch in _Once a Week_ (Nov. 26,
1864), in an article called _An I