I have likened it to--a cozy and carpeted parlor. It
was so high above the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing between
it and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate relations with
the high altitudes before; the snow-peaks had always been remote and
unapproachable grandeurs, hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if one
may use such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations so august
as these.

We could see the streams which fed the torrent we had followed issuing
from under the greenish ramparts of glaciers; but two or three of these,
instead of flowing over the precipices, sank down into the rock and
sprang in big jets out of holes in the mid-face of the walls.

The green nook which I have been describing is called the Gasternthal.
The glacier streams gather and flow through it in a broad and rushing
brook to a narrow cleft between lofty precipices; here the rushing
brook becomes a mad torrent and goes booming and thundering down
toward Kandersteg, lashing and thrashing its way over and among monster
boulders, and hurling chance roots and logs about like straws. There
was no lack of cascades along this route. The path by the side of
the torrent was so narrow that one had to look sharp, when he heard a
cow-bell, and hunt for a place that was wide enough to accommodate a cow
and a Christian side by side, and such places were not always to be had
at an instant's notice. The cows wear church-bells, and that is a
good idea in the cows, for where that torrent is, you couldn't hear
an ordinary cow-bell any further than you could hear the ticking of a
watch.

I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting stranded logs and
dead trees adrift, and I sat on a boulder and watched them go whirling
and leaping head over heels down the boiling torrent. It was a
wonderfully exhilarating spectacle. When I had had enough exercise, I
made the agent take some, by running a race with one of those logs. I
made a trifle by betting on the log.

After dinner we had a walk up and down the Kandersteg valley, in the
soft gloaming, with the spectacle of the dying lights of day playing
about the crests and pinnacles of the still and solemn upper realm
for contrast, and text for talk. There were no sounds but the dulled
complaining of the torrent and the occasional tinkling of a distant
bell. The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace; one
might dream his life tranquilly away there, and not mis