iads of flowers are at their brightest and sweetest.
The infinite variety and abundance of the blossoms is a continual
wonder. They are sown more thickly than the stars in heaven, and the
rainbow itself does not show so many tints. Here they are mingled like
the threads of some strange embroidery; and there again nature has
massed her colours; so that one spot will be all pale blue with
innumerable forget-me-nots, or dark blue with gentians; another will
blush with the delicate pink of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the
clover; and another will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this
opulence of bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so
many as in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of
music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised unseen.
It was like walking through a shower of melody.

From the Alp Pocol, which is simply a fair, lofty pasture, we had our
first full view of Nuvolau, rising bare and strong, like a huge bastion,
from the dark fir-woods. Through these our way led onward now for seven
miles, with but a slight ascent. Then turning off to the left we began
to climb sharply through the forest. There we found abundance of the
lovely Alpenrosen, which do not bloom on the lower ground. Their colour
is a deep, glowing pink, and when a Tyrolese girl gives you one of these
flowers to stick in the band of your hat, you may know that you have
found favour in her eyes.

Through the wood the cuckoo was calling--the bird which reverses the law
of good children, and insists on being heard, but not seen.

When the forest was at an end we found ourselves at the foot of an alp
which sloped steeply up to the Five Towers of Averau. The effect of
these enormous masses of rock, standing out in lonely grandeur, like the
ruins of some forsaken habitation of giants, was tremendous. Seen from
far below in the valley their form was picturesque and striking; but as
we sat beside the clear, cold spring which gushes out at the foot of the
largest tower, the Titanic rocks seemed to hang in the air above us as
if they would overawe us into a sense of their majesty. We felt it to
the full; yet none the less, but rather the more, could we feel at the
same time the delicate and ethereal beauty of the fringed gentianella
and the pale Alpine lilies scattered on the short turf beside us.

We had now been on foot about three hours and a half. The half hour
that remained was th