funniest little toy train. This is the Darjeeling-Himalaya Railway. It
was all very primitive. A man banged with a stick on a piece of metal
by way of a starting-bell, and we set off on our journey to cloudland.

Eagerly looked for, Darjeeling came at last, but alack! no mountains,
only piled-up banks of white clouds. It was bitterly cold, and we were
glad to get out and stamp up to the hotel, where we found great fires
burning in our rooms.

There wasn't much to do in the hotel beyond reading back numbers of
_The Lady's Pictorial_, and I went to bed on Saturday night rather low
in my mind, fearing, after all, I was not to be accounted worthy to
behold the mountains.

Some of the people in the hotel were getting up at 3.30 to go to Tiger
Hill to see the sun rise on Everest. Boggley, the lazy one, wouldn't
hear of going, and when I awoke in the grey dawning stiff with cold,
in spite of a fire and heaps of blankets and rugs, I felt thankful
that I hadn't a strenuous brother. If it had been John, I dare not
think where he would have made me accompany him to in his efforts to
get as near as possible to his beloved mountains. Never shall I forget
the first time he took me to Switzerland to climb. I had never climbed
before--unless you call scrambling on the hills at home climbing--and
I was all eagerness to try till John gave me Whymper's book on Zermatt
to amuse me in the train, and I read of the first ascent of the
Matterhorn and its tragic sequel. It had the effect of reducing me
to a state of abject terror. All through that journey, from Paris to
Lausanne, from Lausanne to Visp, from Visp to Zermatt, horror of the
Matterhorn hung over me like a pall. I even found something sinister
in little Zermatt when we got there--Zermatt that now I love so, with