hem,--a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly
beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still
found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in profusion
amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the snowdrifts.

The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost two
thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so cold
and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on its smooth
upland, and behind it and in front of it are the snow-peaks. That
evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge nearly ten thousand
feet above the level of the sea; but after a climb of an hour and a
half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the glaciers and peaks of that
range, we were prevented from reaching the summit, and driven back by
a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next morning I started for the
GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk
sharply against the sky, except where fleecy clouds lightly draped it
and fantastically blew about it. As I ascended, and turned to look at
it, its beautifully cut peak had caught the first ray of the sun, and
burned with a rosy glow. Some great clouds drifted high in the air: the
summits of the Breithorn, the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold
and white; but the snow down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I
stood upon the summit of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks
of Monte Rosa were just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields
were visible to the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded
ridge of rock, entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The
panorama from it is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great waste
of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left sleeping
at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp. Lured on
by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the ridge, she had
climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and come to meet me.
She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves out of the gray dawn,
and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood awhile together to see
how jocund day ran hither and thither along the mountain-tops, until
the light was all abroad, and then silently turned downward, as one goes
from a mount of devotion.

THE BATHS OF LEUK

In order to make the pass of the Gemmi, it is necessary