ed the landlady the altitude
of her place above the level of the lake, and she told him fourteen
hundred and ninety-five feet. That was all that was said; then he lost
his temper. He said that between ------fools and guide-books, a man
could acquire ignorance enough in twenty-four hours in a country like
this to last him a year. Harris believed our boy had been loading him
up with misinformation; and this was probably the case, for his epithet
described that boy to a dot.

We got under way about the turn of noon, and pulled out for the summit
again, with a fresh and vigorous step. When we had gone about two
hundred yards, and stopped to rest, I glanced to the left while I was
lighting my pipe, and in the distance detected a long worm of black
smoke crawling lazily up the steep mountain. Of course that was the
locomotive. We propped ourselves on our elbows at once, to gaze, for we
had never seen a mountain railway yet. Presently we could make out the
train. It seemed incredible that that thing should creep straight up a
sharp slant like the roof of a house--but there it was, and it was doing
that very miracle.

In the course of a couple hours we reached a fine breezy altitude where
the little shepherd huts had big stones all over their roofs to hold
them down to the earth when the great storms rage. The country was wild
and rocky about here, but there were plenty of trees, plenty of moss,
and grass.

Away off on the opposite shore of the lake we could see some villages,
and now for the first time we could observe the real difference between
their proportions and those of the giant mountains at whose feet they
slept. When one is in one of those villages it seems spacious, and
its houses seem high and not out of proportion to the mountain that
overhangs them--but from our altitude, what a change! The mountains were
bigger and grander than ever, as they stood there thinking their solemn
thoughts with their heads in the drifting clouds, but the villages
at their feet--when the painstaking eye could trace them up and find
them--were so reduced, almost invisible, and lay so flat against the
ground, that the exactest simile I can devise is to compare them to
ant-deposits of granulated dirt overshadowed by the huge bulk of a
cathedral. The steamboats skimming along under the stupendous precipices
were diminished by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sailboats
and rowboats to shallops proper for fairies that keep house