ned pretty carefully,
and ended by rejecting in favour of a rugged ridge of rocks, which they
had hardly reached when there was a quick roar like thunder, and the
guide cried sharply--

"Look!"

He pointed upward toward the snow peaks, which seemed to be a couple of
miles away; and as they followed the direction of his pointing hand,
toward quite a chaos of rock and ice to their left, and about half-way
to the summit, they looked in vain, till Dale cried--

"There it is!"

"Yes: what?" cried Saxe eagerly. "Oh, I see: that little waterfall!"

For far away there was the semblance of a cascade, pouring over the edge
of a black rock, and falling what seemed to be a hundred feet into a
hollow, glittering brilliantly the while in the sun.

They watched it for about five minutes; and then, to Saxe's surprise,
the fall ceased, but the deep rushing noise, as of water, was still
heard, and suddenly the torrent seemed to gush out below, to the left,
and go on again fiercer than ever, but once more to disappear and
reappear again and again, till it made one bold leap into a hollow,
which apparently communicated with the glacier they had left.

"Hah!" ejaculated Saxe, "it was very beautiful, but--Why, that must have
been snow! Was that an avalanche?"

"Yes; didn't you understand? That is one of the ice-falls that are
always coming down from above."

"I didn't take it," said Saxe. "Well, it was very pretty, but not much
of it. I should like to see a big one."

Dale looked at Melchior, and smiled.

"He does not grasp the size of things yet," he said. "Why, Saxe, my
lad, you heard the clap like thunder when the fall first took place?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then don't you grasp that what looked like a cascade tumbling down was
hundreds of tons of hard ice and snow in large fragments? Hark! there
goes another."

There was a deeper-toned roar now, and they stood looking up once more,
with Saxe troubled by a feeling of awe, as the noise came rumbling and
echoing to where they stood.

"That must have been a huge mass down," said Dale at last, after they
had looked up in vain, expecting some visible token of the avalanche.

"Yes, herr: away over that ridge. The snow falls at this time of the
day. We shall not see any of that one. Shall we go on!"

"No, no!" cried Saxe excitedly, "I want to see another one come down.
But did you mean there were hundreds of tons in that first one, that
looked like water?"

"Oh