"And you do not regret, my darling," smiled Ernest, after wishing her the new year's wishes, "having forgiven me for once drinking too much Sillery, and all the other naughty things of my vie de garçon?"

"Regret!" interrupted Nina, vehemently-"regret that I have won your love, live your life, share your cares and joys-regret that my existence is one long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never repay you for the happiness of my life."

"Rather can I never repay you," said Vaughan, looking down into her eyes, "for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I let them think me what they might. You loved me--you believed in me-you aroused me to warmer existence, for I tried to emulate the ideal you had formed of me-the ideal which I felt was what my better nature might still become. It is the love that trusts a man, Nina, that does him good; the love that does not shrink from him because it discovers him to be but a mortal still, with passions and errors like the rest. "Ah, how happy you make me!" cried Nina. "I should have been little worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or if any revelations you cared enough for me, to make of your past life, had parted us:

Love is not love

That alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

There, monsieur !" she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh, while happy tears stood in her eyes-"there is a grand quotation for you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible thing as a hunted PARIS LION!"

FROM EVOLENA TO ZERMATT: PASSAGE OF THE COL D'ERIN.

BY CAPTAIN J. W. CLAYTON.

AFTER a seven hours' walk from Sion to Evolena, we retired to seek our rest at the good little châlet inn of La Dent Blanche (so named from the neighbouring snowy mountain peak, which overhangs the valley). We sought our beds at 7.30 P.M., having to be called at midnight to commence the following day's journey.

To have slept at all would have been miraculous, as our rooms enjoyed a central situation in the establishment; and it so happened that underneath us was the salle-à-manger, transformed on that particular evening, as it would seem, into a temple dedicated to the rites of Comus and Bacchus, and these joint observances fully verified an American gentleman's remark upon that occasion, " that they considerably chawed up our own particular friend Morpheus." Our chance of repose, during the

few hours allowed us, was rendered more uncertain by a system of perpetual moanings and groanings, quite clock-like in their regularity, indicative of depth of slumber and weight of supper, issuing from the chamber on our right; whilst, as a crowning summit to our discontent, a meditative and ambulatory gentleman, duly equipped in thick mountain boots, seemed to be employing his evening hours most conveniently to himself, in rehearsing the walking part of the ghost in "Don Giovanni” in the apartment immediately over our heads. However, at 11.30 that night we were up and ready, enjoying quite a new and refreshing phase of existence in breakfasting at midnight." The three guides then assembled, the bill was paid, and the landlady (an elongated rotundity of good, firm, wholesome, rosy flesh) kissed all round-a curious tradition of the wilder Alpine districts-we took up our Alpenstocks and so started, midst the prayers of the peasants for our safety from the avalanche and the dangers of the glacier.

The road from Evolena, for the first two hours after leaving the floor of the valley, skirted the sides of a wild, deep, and rocky gorge, whose dark and gloomy grandeur looming awful and shadowy 'neath the fitful gleams of moonlight, breaking through the sweeping clouds, whilst from out the black recesses of the wide Alpine forests, with their mournful heads nodding like funereal plumes in the night breeze, burst a hundred bright and silver torrents, bounding madly from crag to crag, till they rushed into the roaring stream below. The path, as we advanced, became narrower, broken, stony, and in parts almost obliterated, and slowly we wended our way, approaching nearer and nearer the tremendous glacier, which poured down its frozen waves into the end of the valley; higher and higher we ascended, till we at length looked down from a lofty precipice, the rolling moon and the quiet stars above, and the cold dead mass of the glacier, sleeping in its spectral light far, far below, whilst all around, soaring high into the skies, a hundred gigantic peaks and lessening mountain chains tossed about as with a giant hand, and, broken into awful and chaotic confusion, rose jagged and sharp against the mournful light of the night heavens, grandly shrouded in the snows that have never melted since the morning of creation.

After four hours' walking from Evolena, we reached the few rude piles of stones called the Châlets of Abricolla, perched on the extreme verge of a precipice rearing abruptly over the rising mists and icy mass beneath. When one of the guides had shouted, a creature, intended to be human, covered with rags and filth, crawled head-foremost out of his den, and we were then soon sitting collected around a heap of burning sticks in the interior of his cabin and devouring some black bread and unknown flesh which had been brought up for our support. The rough figures, in mountaineers' costume, grouped carelessly around the blaze, the wild, dilapidated hut lighted up by the fitful glare or darkened into deep shadows, rendered the scene highly picturesque. We had remained thus more than half an hour, and the night was on the wane; therefore, upon our emerging from the châlet, the scene was of unexampled splendour. One far stupendous circle of towering peaks and dark gigantic rocks, masses of pale ice and dreary fields of eternal snow, surrounded us on all sides, walling up the heavens; their rough heads and long gigantic outlines wildly hurled into the free, cold air, and standing sharply and

boldly out amidst that flood of quiet and tender light which was then bathing the eastern horizon-that softly breathing light, the contest between the first glimmering of the dawn and the slowly retiring shades of the trailing night as it dies on the morning's breast. In a few more minutes the rose tints streamed up trembling from the huge horizon, and then a flood of blazing glory burst from all the skies.

Again onwards. And now the path gradually ascended along the mountain-side, and in an hour we reached the glacier, which was then a dazzling sheet of snow, hard frozen, and sufficiently inclined at an angle to necessitate great care and attention in traversing it. On we floundered, sprawling, skating, laughing, tumbling, now springing over a yawning abyss in the ice, then, as hand-in-hand sometimes with a guide, the four legs suddenly disappearing up to the knees in a crevase covered over with a treacherous coating of snow, too hard frozen at the moment to admit the bodies further into its depths; whilst the individuals themselves simultaneously and sharply assumed a sitting posture, at once magical to the lookers-on and startling to the sitters.

Higher and higher! plains upon plains of boundless snows broke upon our wearied glance as we still toiled on, the then hot blazing sun rendering the white shining glare for miles around us almost intolerable, not a footstep, as the snow melted, certain, and the torment of extreme thirst attacking us. With the excitement of that scene of utter desolation and dumbest silence-the summit of the Col at last rising into view far in our front and gladdening us—we still toiled on, with the jest and thirst on our tongues, the sun's hottest battery on our heads, and one vast tumultuous wilderness of bare ice, snow, and sky around us.

Three hours' more climbing brought us to the Col itself, and, thrusting snow into our mouths to allay their parching, the guides advised us to ⚫ climb and sit down upon a spire of rock rising high out of the snow, in order to recruit our strength for coming difficulties. The view from thence was that which Professor Forbes has estimated above any that mortal eye has witnessed among the High Alps; beyond even that of the Col du Géant over Chamounix. We found ourselves perched on the topmost pinnacle of that sharp perpendicular rock, with a wide world of snows, ice, and scudding cloud around us, and centrally placed between the Matterhorn, the Dent Blanche, and the Dent d'Erin, rising up as gigantic barriers to the rugged and frozen sea, which poured down its hard and stilly waves between them; whilst far away in advance, clothed in its snows and rolling mists, rose the whole gigantic chain of Monte Rosa, with all its peaks and glaciers in full view, shining in the sun. To these are to be added the Straalhorn and the pass of the Weissenthor. The mind seemed at first awed with so sudden a burst of nature's wildest and sublimest horrors-the soaring heights, the huge masses and boulders of impending rock, seeming as if a breath would hurl them to the void beneath, the "glaciers' cold and restless mass"— the long jagged mountain chains scaling the heavens and melting into the furthest distance, and all above and below buried in snow-clouds, confusion, and eternal winter-the almost terrific silence broken alone by the beating of the heart and the roar of the avalanche-the lonely

*Glacier of Zmutt.

sterility-absence of all animal and vegetable life-reduction of created things to ice and cloud,-suspension-death of nature-all seemed cold, chaotic, strange, stony, and ghastly, like the bleak skeleton of some dead and forgotten world.

"Allons donc! en route, messieurs!" shouted our head guide, when he had considered that we were sufficiently impressed, or rather oppressed, with the scene before us; so "up we rose and shook our clothes," and then commenced a rather perilous descent on the face of a cliff of solid ice, a precipice of sixty feet in depth, we at the time being uncomfortably aware of an enormous crevase immediately at its base, into whose horrid depths a single false step of our guides, or even of ourselves, would hurry us all one over another into eternity, and far down into the darkness beneath the cold breast of the glacier.

Our manner of proceeding was on this wise. One of the guides had been quietly slipped down the almost perpendicular decline with a rope fastened under his arms around his body, the other end of the cord being held by another guide, who had posted himself as tightly on the ice as the loose snow would allow of his doing. Slowly and cautiously he paid out the rope as his comrade at the end of it descended, whilst we above anxiously awaited the result of the investigation below as to the danger and state of the crevase, and as to the possibility of our crossing it. A voice from the lower end of the rope soon ascended, however, intimating that with caution it might be done. The guide below, after having dug out with a hatchet holes in the snow and ice to fix his feet as firmly as possible, supporting himself with his staff, unslipped the rope from his body, which was immediately pulled up and fastened round the waist of one of my companions, Captain Hichens, who was then gently let down over the wall of ice, helpless in his turn, entirely at the mercy of the guide, who, holding the rope, was letting it out behind him, and with the yawning gulf immediately below. He then, with the assistance of the guide below, by whose side he now was, fixed himself also into the aforesaid position by hacking out receptacles for his feet. The rope was again drawn up and slung under my own arms in my turn. The like process was repeated in the same manner to my remaining friend Mr. Andrew Hichens, all of us having trusted to the strong arms and very uncertain foothold of the guide who had let us down, as children swing balls with a string for a cat to play with. most dangerous part of the whole performance then commenced.

The

The guide above, who had lowered us all down, being now left alone, began his descent unaided, immediately above our heads. Slowly and cautiously he jagged out holes with the spike of his staff, and into each he successively, as he dug, placed his feet. The precipice presented, I remember, at the time, one abrupt, almost perpendicular wall of glaring ice and fast-melting snow, shining in the uninterrupted rays of a vertical sun. Never shall I forget those few slowly dragging minutes as we were all three with the guide, who had at first descended, trying to keep as firm a footing upon the snow as we could, with the conviction dawning upon us that, as it was fast melting and becoming less and less each moment bound to the body of the ice, the whole mass which supported our united weight might at any moment give way; and as we turned our eyes into the blackness of the yawning gulf beneath us, and hung with

eagerness indescribable upon every footstep of the descending guide over our heads, who, should he have made a single false step, or the snow have given way to his tread, would have bounded down upon us all like a ball from a gun, and with the force of his fall swept us away in an instant into oblivion. The excitement, the uncertainty of our position, added to the intense glare and parching thirst (which snow-water cannot satisfy), all formed a striking whole, which now, as one looks back, may certainly be regarded as one of the most momentous periods and a landmark of our existence. Nearer and nearer approached the descending guide, and we below then prepared to leap on to a narrow and seemingly most dubious-looking bridge of snow which spanned the crevase before us; and at the very moment that the last of us had cleared the chasm with a bound off the snow-ridge on to the flat ice-plain on the opposite side, the snow on the precipice, which had so well supported us all, having been dislodged by our previous footsteps, gave way en masse to the heat of the sun; down dashed the guide over the now bare and shining surface of the ice-cliff at a fearful pace, yet, by preserving his presence of mind, and keeping his eyes steadily fixed on the cavern before him, he, with a sharp and dexterous spring and twist of his body as he came upon its verge, gave himself just sufficient impetus to shoot right across its jaws, and to land him safely on his back amongst us.

With a sigh of relief we then all passed rapidly over a flat to a rocky promontory, jutting out over the great glacier of Zmutt, where, after having swallowed a few more mouthfuls of the black bread and unknown flesh, and after eight hours' climbing, we stretched ourselves along the sharp and hard rock amidst the vast shadows of the towering Matterhorn, and the wildest deserts of the cold and silent Alps, and slept for one hour profoundly, as if the rock had been our bed in England, and dreamt as happily. The hour flew by, we were off again and refreshed.

At the base of the rock a narrow ledge of pure uncovered ice, somewhat like a gigantic razor's edge, with deep-winding crevases on either side, had to be crossed with great caution. This led us on to a smooth inclined plain, off which also the snow had all disappeared, rendering it slippery and fearful. Slowly and carefully was each foot tried and placed before advancing, the wide rents and dark chasms opening horribly all around, excepting at the narrow neck of ice, across which we passedgoodness knows how!-on to the main body of the glacier.

from

It is generally-we were afterwards told-customary for most mountaineers and all travellers to be attached to each other by a rope waist to waist, at the place aforementioned, for, should one fall off his balance, he is caught by the rope, and prevented from being dashed into the clefts of the ice and the torrents which roll below them, as, when alone and singly, as was our case, the slightest wavering of balance, or giddiness of head, or uncertain footfall, would, in all probability, be death. All danger was now, comparatively speaking, over, and our only labour, as we crossed the chilly fields of ice, was leaping at every few steps, and at length quite carelessly, across caverns, whose depth could not be guessed, while far below us, under the glacier, we heard the rushing cataracts.

The crossing of these rents and fissures is, of course, ever dangerous to those traversing the glacier, sometimes from their numbers, monotonous