ins had swept away.
Excepting a short space at the foot of the slope, and another towards
the farther end of the cave, the floor was covered with ice, in some
parts from 3 to 4 feet thick: of this a considerable area had been
removed to a depth of 2 1/2 or 3 feet, leaving a pond of water a foot
deep, with bottom and banks of ice. The rock which composes the true
floor rises at the farthest end of the cave, and the roof is so
arranged that a sort of private chapel is there formed; and from a
fissure in the dome a monster column of ice had been constructed on
the floor, which, at the time of my visit, had lost its upper parts,
and stood as a hollow truncated cone with sides a foot thick, and with
seas of ice streaming from it, and covering the rising pavement of the
chapel. Without an axe, and without help, I was unable to measure the
girth of this column, which had not been without companions on a
smaller scale in the immediate neighbourhood. At the west end of the
cave, the wall was thickly covered for a large space with small
limestone stalactites, producing the effect of many tiers of fringe on
a shawl; while from a dark fissure in the roof a large piece of fluted
drapery of the same material hung, calling to mind some of the vastly
grander details of the grottoes of Hans-sur-Lesse in Belgium: down
this wall there was also a long row of icicles, on the edges of a
narrow fissure. The north-west corner was very dark, and an opening in
the wall of rock high above the ground suggested a tantalising cave up
there: the ground in this corner was occupied by the shattered remains
of numerous columns of ice, which had originally covered a circular
area between 60 and 70 feet in circumference.

[Illustration: VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIERE OF GRACE-DIEU, NEAR
BESANCON.]

The three large masses of ice which rendered this glaciere in some
respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line
from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the
floor where the ice was thickest. The central mass was extremely
solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular
pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very
striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the
ice-floor with which it blended. The mass which lay to the east of
this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had
found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had
a