't believe old Melk was half so much frightened as I was."

"It's very silly lying here," he said to himself again, as the scent of
the burning pine-wood increased. "Bit cold outside the rug; but we left
the door and the windows open last night, and that's healthy all the
same. I do wish, though, I could get on without being scared so soon.
Perhaps it's all through being ill last year and feeling so weak. But I
didn't seem weak yesterday. I was precious tired, but so was Mr Dale.
I'm afraid I'm a coward, and I suppose all I can do is to hide it and
not let people see."

"They sha'n't see!" he muttered, after a few minutes; and then he lay
still, thinking of home, his mother and father, and of their ready
consent when Mr Dale offered to take him as his companion in an
experimental trip to the high Alps.

"I wonder what they are all doing now?" he thought. "Asleep, of course.
I don't believe my mother would sleep comfortably, though, if she knew
I was lying out here like this, with no bed-curtains and the snow just
over us. It is rum, though--summer and winter all muddled up together
so closely that you stand with your right leg in July, picking flowers
and catching butterflies, and the left leg in January, so that you can
turn over and make a snowball or pick icicles off the rocks."

A pleasant, drowsy sensation began to steal over him, and he was about
to give way to it, when the idea came like a flash that it would be idle
and cowardly; and this thought made him spring up, and fold the rug in
which he had been rolled; and after a glance at where Mr Dale still
slept, he went softly out of the clump of trees in the direction where
he could hear the crackling, to find Melchior in the act of placing the
tin kettle they had brought upon the fire.

"Good morning, herr. A fine day."

"Not much day about it," said Saxe, with a slight shiver. "What time is
it?"

"I don't know, herr; but the sun will soon be up. Look!"

He pointed overhead to where, grim-looking and grey, one of the
mountains towered up: and right away, at a great height, there was what
looked like a broad streak of pale--very pale--red, apparently a piece
of cloud just over the mountain top.

"What's that?"

"Snow, herr, beginning to be lit up by the sun. That is where we are
going by-and-by--the mountain with the enow on one side but bare rock on
the other."

Saxe stood gazing upward with a feeling of awe creeping over him. There
was n