rhung by bare and
forbidding crags which husbanded drifts of everlasting snow in their
shaded cavities, was a small stretch of thin and discouraged grass, and
a man and a family of pigs were actually living here in some shanties.
Consequently this place could be really reckoned as "property"; it had
a money value, and was doubtless taxed. I think it must have marked
the limit of real estate in this world. It would be hard to set a money
value upon any piece of earth that lies between that spot and the empty
realm of space. That man may claim the distinction of owning the end
of the world, for if there is any definite end to the world he has
certainly found it.

From here forward we moved through a storm-swept and smileless
desolation. All about us rose gigantic masses, crags, and ramparts of
bare and dreary rock, with not a vestige or semblance of plant or tree
or flower anywhere, or glimpse of any creature that had life. The frost
and the tempests of unnumbered ages had battered and hacked at these
cliffs, with a deathless energy, destroying them piecemeal; so all the
region about their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments which
had been split off and hurled to the ground. Soiled and aged banks of
snow lay close about our path. The ghastly desolation of the place was
as tremendously complete as if Dore had furnished the working-plans
for it. But every now and then, through the stern gateways around us
we caught a view of some neighboring majestic dome, sheathed with
glittering ice, and displaying its white purity at an elevation compared
to which ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle always
chained one's interest and admiration at once, and made him forget there
was anything ugly in the world.

I have just said that there was nothing but death and desolation in
these hideous places, but I forgot. In the most forlorn and arid and
dismal one of all, where the racked and splintered debris was thickest,
where the ancient patches of snow lay against the very path, where
the winds blew bitterest and the general aspect was mournfulest and
dreariest, and furthest from any suggestion of cheer or hope, I found
a solitary wee forget-me-not flourishing away, not a droop about it
anywhere, but holding its bright blue star up with the prettiest and
gallantest air in the world, the only happy spirit, the only smiling
thing, in all that grisly desert. She seemed to say, "Cheer up!--as long
as we are here, let