"Confound you!" I cried, for Denny laughed openly at me; and I rushed
back to the hall! But on the threshold I paused--and said what I will
not write.

For, though there came from somewhere just the last ripple of a mirthful
laugh, the hall was empty! Phroso was gone! I flung the pickaxe down
with a clatter on the boards, and exclaimed in my haste:

"I wish to heaven I'd never bought the island!"

But I did not mean that really.

(_To be continued._)

CLIMBING MONT BLANC IN A BLIZZARD.

CAUGHT IN A BLINDING SNOW STORM ON A NARROW CLIFF, TWO AND A HALF
MILES ABOVE SEA LEVEL.

BY GARRETT P. SERVISS,

Author of "Astronomy with an Opera Glass," "Climbing the Matterhorn,"[15]
etc.

[Footnote 15: See MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE for September, 1895.]

Standing on the spindling tower of the Matterhorn early one August
morning in 1894 I saw, for the first time, the white crown of Europe,
Mont Blanc, with its snows sparkling high above the roof of clouds that
covered the dozing summer in the valleys of Piedmont. Just one year
later I started from Chamonix to climb to that cool world in the blue.

My guide was Ambroise Couttet, whose family name is famous in the
mountaineering annals of Savoy. An earlier Ambroise Couttet lies in the
icy bosom of Mont Blanc, fallen, years ago, down a crevasse so profound
that his would-be rescuers were drawn, baffled, awe-struck, and with
shaking nerves, from its horrible depths, whose bottom they could not
find. Even before that time Pierre Couttet had been whirled to death on
the great peak, and his body, embedded and preserved in a glacier, was
found nearly half a century afterward at its foot. And two other
Couttets of past years escaped, by the merest hair of miraculous
fortune, from a catastrophe on the same dreadful slopes in which three
of their comrades were swallowed up. Yet the Ambroise Couttet of to-day
is never so happy as when he is on the mountain. His eyes sparkle if he
hears the thunder of an avalanche, and he smiles as he watches its
tossing white crest ploughing swiftly across some snowy incline which he
has just traversed.

One porter sufficed, for my only traps consisted of a hand camera, a
field-glass, and a few extra woollen shirts and stockings. Having had no
serious exercise since climbing the Matterhorn a year before, I deemed
it prudent to spare my strength for the more important work above by
taking a mule to the Pierre Pointue. It was a fine morning, off