py eye, and flying hair, and
jolly red face, and offering his card to the old German gentleman while
he praised his hack and horses, and both teams were whizzing down a
long hill with nobody in a position to tell whether we were bound to
destruction or an undeserved safety.

Toward sunset we entered a beautiful green valley dotted with chalets, a
cozy little domain hidden away from the busy world in a cloistered nook
among giant precipices topped with snowy peaks that seemed to float like
islands above the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them
from the lower world. Down from vague and vaporous heights, little
ruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling, and found their way to the
verge of one of those tremendous overhanging walls, whence they plunged,
a shaft of silver, shivered to atoms in mid-descent and turned to an air
puff of luminous dust. Here and there, in grooved depressions among the
snowy desolations of the upper altitudes, one glimpsed the extremity of
a glacier, with its sea-green and honeycombed battlements of ice.

Up the valley, under a dizzy precipice, nestled the village of
Kandersteg, our halting-place for the night. We were soon there, and
housed in the hotel. But the waning day had such an inviting influence
that we did not remain housed many moments, but struck out and followed
a roaring torrent of ice-water up to its far source in a sort of little
grass-carpeted parlor, walled in all around by vast precipices and
overlooked by clustering summits of ice. This was the snuggest little
croquet-ground imaginable; it was perfectly level, and not more than a
mile long by half a mile wide. The walls around it were so gigantic, and
everything about it was on so mighty a scale that it was belittled, by
contrast, to what I have likened it to--a cozy and carpeted parlor. It
was so high above the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing between
it and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate relations with
the high altitudes before; the snow-peaks had always been remote and
unapproachable grandeurs, hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if one
may use such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations so august
as these.

We could see the streams which fed the torrent we had followed issuing
from under the greenish ramparts of glaciers; but two or three of these,
instead of flowing over the precipices, sank down into the rock and
sprang in big jets out of holes in the mid-face o