which seemed to come nearer to him--so near that it almost
touched him; then receded, till it was almost invisible, and once more
stood quite still.

But it was not moving, and Saxe still had sufficient command over self
to know that this effect was produced by the mist from the fall being
wafted between them by the soft night wind.

How long he stood bent forward there gazing at that horrible head Saxe
did not know, but by degrees he began to shrink back slowly, getting
farther and farther away, till he dared to turn and run with all his
might to the tent door, and creep in, fully expecting that the monster
was about to spring upon him till he was inside, when he fastened the
canvas door with trembling fingers, and crept to his bed again, where he
lay down quickly, with his breath sobbing and the perspiration standing
in great drops upon his face. The sensation was upon him that the
terrible being he had seen would begin breaking in through the canvas
directly, and he lay there with one arm stretched out ready to wake up
Dale for help at the first sound outside the tent.

As he now lay trembling there, he recalled Melchior's words about the
valley being bewitched, the falling stones, the disappearance of the
crystals; and he was fast growing into a belief that the old legends
must be true, and that there really existed a race of horrible little
beings beneath the earth, whose duty it was to protect the treasures of
the subterranean lands, and that this was one of them on the watch to
take the crystals from their hands. But in the midst of the intense
silence of the night better sense began to prevail.

"It's all nonsense--all impossible," he muttered. "There are no such
things, and it was all fancy. I must have seen a block of stone through
the falling water, and I was half asleep and nearly dreaming at the
time. Why, if I were to wake Mr Dale and tell him, he would laugh at
me. It was all a dream."

But, all the same, he lay shivering there, the aspect of the face having
startled him in a way that at times enforced belief; and it was getting
rapidly on toward morning when he once more fell asleep, to dream of
that hideous head and see the terrible eyes gazing right into his own.

CHAPTER FORTY.

IN THE ICE-CAVE.

The sun was shining brightly on as lovely a morning as had fallen to
their lot since they had been in the Alps; and upon Saxe springing up,
his first act was to go up to the spring for his