sket,
shook the bottle of holy water in Schwartz's face till it frothed
again, and marched off in the highest spirits in the world.

It was indeed a morning that might have made anyone happy, even with no
Golden River to seek for. Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along
the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains, their lower cliffs
in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapor but
gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp
touches of ruddy color along the angular crags, and pierced, in long,
level rays, through their fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up
red, splintered masses of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into
myriads of fantastic forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow
traced down their chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far
beyond and far above all these, fainter than the morning cloud but
purer and changeless, slept, in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the
eternal snow.

The Golden River, which sprang from one of the lower and snowless
elevations, was now nearly in shadow--all but the uppermost jets of
spray, which rose like slow smoke above the undulating line of the
cataract and floated away in feeble wreaths upon the morning wind.

On this object, and on this alone, Hans's eyes and thoughts were fixed.
Forgetting the distance he had to traverse, he set off at an imprudent
rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the
first range of the green and low hills. He was, moreover, surprised,
on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence,
notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been
absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden
River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practiced mountaineer,
yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a
glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all
its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water--not monotonous or low,
but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of
wild melody, then breaking off into short, melancholy tones or sudden
shrieks resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice
was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought,
like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious
EXPRESSION about all their outlines--a perpetual resemblance to living
features, disto