ining the amount of
meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers
their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at
which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with
him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a
cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of
the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on
'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the
fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this
particular peak.

What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never
write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature,
which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops
from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior
tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an
Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look
as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why
is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite
of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are
questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the
group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch
a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed
him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and
terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent
description of the _arete_. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed
and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for
the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls
one "dreadful place where you look down five thousand feet clear." The
whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points
from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught.
Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord
pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must
come. At last there is a distant _jodel_, and in an hour or so the hero
arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd
around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he
told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing
out of the way." Pressed by the spinste