with a hatchet in advance cut us footsteps. (Albert Smith has opened this passage within five years.) Here and there is a stream of water, so pure one might fancy it to be melted diamonds. Thousands of chasms in the ice, five hundred or more feet deep, of a beautiful blue colour, and a torrent beneath, had to be passed by a plank thrown across. What is a precipice to-day is closed up to-morrow by the constant movement of the ice. Take the tout ensemble, it gives you the idea of a rebellious sea that had dared to run mountains high, in defiance of its Creator, who had struck it (while in motion) into ice. Here and there came a furious waterfall or torrent; a plank was then thrown across in a safe part. Once I slipped, and my legs fell in, and my alpenstock; but I clung to the stump till hauled up. Then came the Mauvais Pas. You descend the side of a precipice by holes cut for your feet, and let yourself down by a rope. If one has got a good head, it is worth while looking down. Hamlets look like a set of tea-things, men (if seen at all) like ants beneath one; and how glorious! one is suspended between heaven and earth, and one's immortal part soars higher than the prison carcase can! As one loves to feel one's own nothingness by the side of the man to whom one has given one's heart, so does this feeling (the best we own) increase in magnitude when it relates to God. He holds you there, He guards against that false step which would dash you to pieces, and gives you the power of brain to look below, around, and upwards, to wonder and to thank. I think this was the most intense excitement of its sort that I had felt in my girl
