is the inn, with its scattered
out-buildings, where we were to spend the night. The sheer descent from
the summit of the Furka is only about half a mile; but though our horses
had galloped the whole distance, and the inn was in sight all the time,
we were three hours reaching it; so many turns did the road make upon
the face of the mountain.

It was a gloomy valley, shut in by mountains, and surrounded by lesser
hills all soaked and dripping with icy streams that chilled the air. We
gained the foot of the glacier from the inn by a rough path over and
among the rocks, and stones, and heaps of gravel it had brought down and
deposited here. From beneath the solid mass of ice flowed a hundred
shallow streams, which, uniting, form the beginning of the River Rhone.
We penetrated for a short distance the gallery cut into the glacier,
surrounded and shut down upon by the walls and ceiling, of a deep blue
color, and were preceded by an old man, who awoke the echoes by uttering
a series of broken cries. What with the echoes and horrible chill, the
place seemed most unearthly, and we were glad to retreat.

The roar of torrents, and hardly less thunderous noise of departing
diligences, awakened us the next morning. We were soon off upon the
road, skirting the mountains, rolling through the pleasant valleys, and
passing village after village now. They seemed silent and deserted,
their occupants perhaps busy in the fields, or serving at the inns, or
among the mountains as guides. One was a mass of ruins, thrown down in
the bed of a torrent, among which a few dull-faced peasants were at
work, with a hopeless, aimless air, that promised little. A mountain
stream, swollen to a flood by melting snows, had swept it away in a
night.

At noon we lunched at Viesch--a slipshod, unwashed village, by the side
of the young Rhone, which so far, in its dirty, chalk-white color, was
not unlike the white-headed children that played upon its banks. Some of
the party left the horses to their noon rest, and strayed out upon the
road beyond the village. On its outskirts was a fine new church, of
stone. If only something of its beauty could but come into the every-day
lives of the poor people here! We sat down upon the steps to wait.
Across the road was an orchard, roughly fenced in; beside it one of the
picturesque Swiss peasant houses--all steps, and queer old galleries,
from which a little tow-headed girl stared out at us in open-eyed
wonder, as w