ere everybody wanted us to
go out on the lake, said to be the most beautiful lake in the world, and
we sailed on it, and rowed on it, and looked down into the clear water
where it is said you can see a corpse on the bottom of the lake 100 feet
down. We hadn't lost any corpse, except the corpse of that old woman
we run over at Nice, but we wanted to get the worth of our money, so we
kept looking for days, but the search for a corpse becomes tame after
awhile, and we gave it up. All we saw in the bottom of the lake was a
cow, but no man can weep properly over the remains of a cow, and dad
said they could go to the deuce with their corpses, and we just camped
at the hotel till our money came. Say, that lake they talk so much about
is no better than lakes all over Wisconsin, and there are no black bass
or muskellunges in it.

The tourists here are just daffy about climbing mountains and glaziers,
and they talk about it all the time, and I could see dad's finish.
They told him that no American that ever visited Switzerland would be
recognized when he got home if he had not climbed the glaziers, so dad
arranged for a trip up into the sky. We went 100 miles or so on the
cars, passing along valleys where all the cows wear tea bells, and it
sounds like chimes in the distance. It is beautiful in Switzerland,
but the cheese is something awful. A piece of native Swiss cheese would
break up a family.

At night we arrived at a station where we hired guides and clothes, and
things, and the next morning we started. Dad wanted me to stay at the
station a couple of days, while he was gone, and play with the goats,
but I told him if there were any places in the mountains or glaziers any
more dangerous than Paris or Monte Carlo, I wanted to visit them, so he
let me go. Well, we were rigged up for discovering the north pole, and
had alpenstocks to push ourselves up with, and the guides had ropes to
pull us up when we got to places where we couldn't climb. I could get
along all right, but they had dad on a rope most of the time pulling him
until his tongue run out and his face turned blue. But dad was game, and
don't you forget it.

Before noon we got on top of a glazier, which is the ice of a frozen
river, that moves all the time, sliding towards the sea.

[Illustration: Dad slipped down a crevice about 100 feet 181]

There was nothing but a hard winter, in summer, to the experience, and
we would have gone back the same night, only dad