see it in print before the train goes.
When the train descends, every passenger has one of these two-cent
certificates of his exploit. When our party entered, there was a great
run on the register, especially by women, who have a repugnance, as is
well known, to seeing their names in print. In the room was a hot stove,
which was more attractive than the cold clouds, but unable to compete in
interest with the register. The artist, who seemed to be in a sardonic
mood, and could get no chance to enter his name, watched the scene, while
his friends enjoyed the view of the stove. After registering, the
visitors all bought note-paper with a chromo heading, "Among the Clouds,"
and a natural wild-flower stuck on the corner, and then rushed to the
writing-room in order to indite an epistle "from the summit." This is
indispensable.

After that they were ready for the Signal Station. This is a great
attraction. The sergeant in charge looked bored to death, and in the
mood to predict the worst kind of weather. He is all day beset with a
crowd craning their necks to look at him, and bothered with ten thousand
questions. He told King that the tourists made his life miserable; they
were a great deal worse than the blizzards in the winter. And the
government, he said, does not take this into account in his salary.

Occasionally there was an alarm that the mist was getting thin, that the
clouds were about to break, and a rush was made out-of-doors, and the
tourists dispersed about on the rocks. They were all on the qui vine to
see the hotel or the boarding-house they had left in the early morning.
Excursionists continually swarmed in by rail or by carriage road. The
artist, who had one of his moods for wanting to see nature, said there
were too many women; he wanted to know why there were always so many
women on excursions. "You can see nothing but excursionists; whichever
way you look, you see their backs." These backs, looming out of the
mist, or discovered in a rift, seemed to enrage him.

At length something actually happened. The curtain of cloud slowly
lifted, exactly as in a theatre; for a moment there was a magnificent
view of peaks, forests, valleys, a burst of sunshine on the lost world,
and then the curtain dropped, amid a storm of "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and
intense excitement. Three or four times, as if in response to the call
of the spectators, this was repeated, the curtain lifting every time on a
different scene, and then i