pine climber, Dr. Leith, left
Pontresina early one morning to climb a rock-peak. We were in a light
carriage with a guide and porter. The young horse which drew us, as we
were rattling down the high embanked road leading to Samaden, took a
sharp turn to the right, where a road branched off. He was sharply
checked by the guide, with the result that the carriage collided with a
stone post, and we were all flung out down the embankment, a living
cataract of men, ice-axes, haversacks, and wraps. The horse fortunately
stopped. We picked ourselves ruefully up and resumed our places. Not
until we reached our destination did we become aware that the whole
incident had passed in silence. Not one word of advice or recrimination
or even of surprise had passed anyone's lips!

But Hugh's climbing was put a stop to by a sharp attack of heart-failure
on the Piz Palu. He was with my brother Fred, and after a long climb
through heavy snow, he collapsed and was with difficulty carried down.
He believed himself to be on the point of death, and records in one of
his books that the prospect aroused no emotion whatever in his mind
either of fear or excitement, only of deep curiosity.

While he was an undergraduate, he and I had a sudden and overwhelming
interest in family history and genealogy. We went up to Yorkshire for a
few days one winter, stayed at Pateley Bridge, Ripon, Bolton Abbey,
Ripley, and finally York. At Pateley Bridge we found the parish
registers very ancient and complete, and by the aid of them, together
with the printed register of Fountains Abbey, we traced a family tree
back as far as to the fourteenth century, with ever-increasing evidence
of the poverty and mean condition of our ancestral stock. We visited the
houses and cradles of the race, and from comfortable granges and
farmsteads we declined, as the record conducted us back, to hovels and
huts of quite conspicuous humility and squalor. The thermometer fell
lower and lower every day, in sympathy with our researches. I remember a
night when we slept in a neglected assembly-room tacked on to a country
inn, on hastily improvised and scantily covered beds, when the water
froze in the ewers; and an attempt to walk over the moors one afternoon
from Masham into Nidderdale, when the springs by the roadside froze into
lumpy congealments, like guttering candles, and we were obliged to turn
back; and how we beguiled a ten-mile walk to Ripon, the last train
having gone, by te