t their form. There are
pansies; gentians of a deeper blue than flower ever was before;
forget-me-nots, a pink variety among them; violets, the Alpine rose
and the Alpine violet; delicate pink flowers of moss; harebells; and
quantities for which we know no names, more exquisite in shape and
color than the choicest products of the greenhouse. Large slopes are
covered with them,--a brilliant show to the eye, and most pleasantly
beguiling the way of its tediousness. As high as I ascended, I still
found some of these delicate flowers, the pink moss growing in
profusion amongst the rocks of the GornerGrat, and close to the
snowdrifts.

The inn on the Riffelberg is nearly eight thousand feet high, almost
two thousand feet above the hut on Mount Washington; yet it is not so
cold and desolate as the latter. Grass grows and flowers bloom on
its smooth upland, and behind it and in front of it are the
snow-peaks. That evening we essayed the Gorner-Grat, a rocky ledge
nearly ten thousand feet above the level of the sea; but after a
climb of an hour and a half, and a good view of Monte Rosa and the
glaciers and peaks of that range, we were prevented from reaching the
summit, and driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next
morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The
Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk sharply against the sky, except where
fleecy clouds lightly draped it and fantastically blew about it. As
I ascended, and turned to look at it, its beautifully cut peak had
caught the first ray of the sun, and burned with a rosy glow. Some
great clouds drifted high in the air: the summits of the Breithorn,
the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold and white; but the snow
down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I stood upon the summit
of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks of Monte Rosa were
just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields were visible to
the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock,
entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it
is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great
waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left
sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp.
Lured on by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the
ridge, she had climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and
come to meet me. She also had see