only need to hollow it out and put in the electric light. He could give
audience to a nation at a time under its roof.

Our search for those remains having failed, we inspected with a glass
the dim and distant track of an old-time avalanche that once swept down
from some pine-grown summits behind the town and swept away the houses
and buried the people; then we struck down the road that leads toward
the Rhone, to see the famous Ladders. These perilous things are built
against the perpendicular face of a cliff two or three hundred feet
high. The peasants, of both sexes, were climbing up and down them, with
heavy loads on their backs. I ordered Harris to make the ascent, so I
could put the thrill and horror of it in my book, and he accomplished
the feat successfully, through a subagent, for three francs, which I
paid. It makes me shudder yet when I think of what I felt when I was
clinging there between heaven and earth in the person of that proxy. At
times the world swam around me, and I could hardly keep from letting go,
so dizzying was the appalling danger. Many a person would have given up
and descended, but I stuck to my task, and would not yield until I had
accomplished it. I felt a just pride in my exploit, but I would not have
repeated it for the wealth of the world. I shall break my neck yet with
some such foolhardy performance, for warnings never seem to have any
lasting effect on me. When the people of the hotel found that I had
been climbing those crazy Ladders, it made me an object of considerable
attention.

Next morning, early, we drove to the Rhone valley and took the train for
Visp. There we shouldered our knapsacks and things, and set out on foot,
in a tremendous rain, up the winding gorge, toward Zermatt. Hour after
hour we slopped along, by the roaring torrent, and under noble Lesser
Alps which were clothed in rich velvety green all the way up and
had little atomy Swiss homes perched upon grassy benches along their
mist-dimmed heights.

The rain continued to pour and the torrent to boom, and we continued
to enjoy both. At the one spot where this torrent tossed its white mane
highest, and thundered loudest, and lashed the big boulders fiercest,
the canton had done itself the honor to build the flimsiest wooden
bridge that exists in the world. While we were walking over it, along
with a party of horsemen, I noticed that even the larger raindrops made
it shake. I called Harris's attention to it, and he n