Once passed, we traversed a path over the moraine and on the cliff beyond it, which certainly we considered perilous enough,more so than the glacier: seeing that part of the way was by means of steps cut straight down the face of a precipice which sloped into a bottomless ravine, and all slippery, running with water; and you had to turn a terrible corner on a shaly ledge, with your face against the cliff side, having nothing to hold on by, and two inches behind you a continuation of said cliff still straight down : we did it all manfully; but when we got home at the end of this adventurous day and looked out the place in Murray, we had the melancholy satisfaction of finding that it is called "Le Mauvais Pas, very difficult, along extremely narrow wet and slippery ledges of rock, and which should not be attempted by one who has not a remarkably steady head, and who is not an experienced cragsman:" this diploma as a "cragsman" is something in its way for an unaware Paterfamilias, who really was and is quite unambitious of such classical honours as Murray's praise portends, and would rather put them all to the account of a bad guide.

Hear what followed: first, a pleasant interval of safety; we surmounted Le Chapeau,

a steep hill top at the end of the valley; giving all heed to its beautiful view of the vale of Chamouni, spread like a tartan scarf in little squares of green and yellow crops under grand Mont Blanc,-that great Cathedral of Nature, spired domed and minaretted, with mighty black peaks, a ridge-roof of snow, shaggy walls, and glaciers like great sheets let down from heaven: the other sentinels of the valley being sharp Mont Brevent and his brethren cut out in iron against the sky and then below us all this tost tumultuous frozen sea of ice pent in by needle obelisks thirteen thousand feet high reckoning from the ocean level, and seven thousand straight up from the glacier itself; besides all the other nameless glories of a landscape never yet fixed on any canvas, and only to be seen on so bright a day as ours. Remember casual friends met upon the Chapeau, who had come the easy valley way on mules, and how our Yankee cousin's characteristic revolver tried to waken echoes vainly; and all our pleasant talk.

Well, this over by about noon, and having already crowded two regulation Chamouni days into one, we, feeling still game for anything in the bracing mountain air, resolved to do yet more, and make of the Flegêre another conquest: so by a rough forest way, (our guide even then

commencing "short cuts,") we tumbled through a fir wood from our many thousand feet eminence into Chamouni valley again, and began creeping up the other side by an easy mule-path for the summit of the Flegêre. But the day being very hot, the path shadeless, our guide ambitious, and ourselves ignorant believers in his wisdom, it so happened that he, that same false guide, offhandedly proposed une route plus courte ;" and as the first part of it though pathless lay through some shady pines, we followed in his wake. Soon the forest became tangled and rocky, and after a long up-hill fight with it we got on to the débris of a landslip, stony, loose, precipitous: our guide had already missed his way, but said nothing about it to us, so scrambling on we followed: this sort of thing led to a dry watercourse, steep and perilous from rolling stones; and as matters were every half-hour getting worse and worse, we elicited from said guide a confession that we were lost on an entirely untrodden part of the mountain; and there was a sort of feeling that to scramble somehow back again, down the precipitous way which (often on hands and knees) we had been two hours scrambling up, would be the wisest thing to do: however, Anglo-Saxons never give up, and, (to say nothing of the real peril of such

a precipitous return by tumble-down places utterly unfaceable,) our object was the summit, our motto "Excelsior." Well, not to be tedious, for three painful hours more we slowly scrambled up, up, up; that poor foolish fellow having saved my life fifty times by dragging me bodily up rough crags where it made one dizzy to look back,—so reasonably enough he felt forgiven; and five times having been obliged to be sent in advance by us to make out any feasible way of further progress.

I have since spoken to some experienced guides about all this, and they assure us that we were in great danger: none of them, nor of the Chamouni shepherds, ever get upon that part of the Flegêre, a mere avalanche of loose rocks on the steepest possible slope, varied here and there by downright precipices. That the sons and daughters of the valley do not go there was manifest from frequent large patches of cranberries ripe and red, wild raspberries, and whorts. Nothing but a goat was ever where we climbed, and that hypothetical goat must have been an insane one. In due time however, by dint of dragging ourselves upwards by fir boughs, (the trees growing nearly parallel with the mountain side,) by circumventing positive cliffs, by climbing huge boulders, and by general earnest Anglo-Saxon will, our up

ward march prevailed, and very late in the afternoon we stood upon the top; I trust truly thankful to a kind Providence which had thus at last overruled our dangers into safety. There were more perils too than I have spoken of, e. g. plenty of adders and slow-worms, and I nearly trod on one, that stealthily crept from under my foot. All's well that ends well, however; and, after refreshment at that welcome Flegêre chalet, (for we were worn out with toil,) and the easy run home thereafter (what cared we for the ordinary perils and travail of a two hours' rough descent on a well-used mule path, albeit in the darkening eventide?) -and the immediate hot bath, and the refreshing nine o'clock tea at our hotel after it,after all this, we can now afford to think calmly, though I hope humbly and gratefully, that at least a terrible night upon the bleak steep Alpside, if not broken bones or death itself at the bottom of a precipice, was very likely to have been our fate some hours ago,because a silly young guide would attempt a "short cut." The matter is known to senior guides already; and I do not doubt the cause of all this peril will hear of it for years to

come.

To recapitulate my single day at Chamouni: thirteen hours of climbing, up and