nded during this season with the regularity with which the parish
churches of Ronco, Altanca, &c., are attended during the rest of the
year. The young people, I am sure, like these annual visits to the high
places, and will be hardly weaned from them. Happily the hay will be
always there, and will have to be cut by some one, and the old people
will send the young ones.

As I was thinking of these things, I found myself going off into a doze,
and thought the burnished man from the furnace came up and sat beside me,
and laid his hand upon my shoulder. Then I saw the green slopes that
rise all round the lake were much higher than I had thought; they went up
thousands of feet, and there were pine forests upon them, while two large
glaciers came down in streams that ended in a precipice of ice, falling
sheer into the lake. The edges of the mountains against the sky were
rugged and full of clefts, through which I saw thick clouds of dust being
blown by the wind as though from the other side of the mountains.

And as I looked, I saw that this was not dust, but people coming in
crowds from the other side, but so small as to be visible at first only
as dust. And the people became musicians, and the mountainous
amphitheatre a huge orchestra, and the glaciers were two noble armies of
women-singers in white robes, ranged tier above tier behind each other,
and the pines became orchestral players, while the thick dust-like cloud
of chorus-singers kept pouring in through the clefts in the precipices in
inconceivable numbers. When I turned my telescope upon them I saw they
were crowded up to the extreme edge of the mountains, so that I could see
underneath the soles of their boots as their legs dangled in the air. In
the midst of all, a precipice that rose from out of the glaciers shaped
itself suddenly into an organ, and there was one whose face I well knew
sitting at the keyboard, smiling and pluming himself like a bird as he
thundered forth a giant fugue by way of overture. I heard the great
pedal notes in the bass stalk majestically up and down, as the rays of
the Aurora that go about upon the face of the heavens off the coast of
Labrador. Then presently the people rose and sang the chorus "Venus
Laughing from the Skies;" but ere the sound had well died away, I awoke,
and all was changed; a light fleecy cloud had filled the whole basin, but
I still thought I heard a sound of music, and a scampering-off of great
crowds from