summit, and driven back by a sharp storm of hail and rain. The next
morning I started for the GornerGrat again, at four o'clock. The
Matterhorn lifted its huge bulk sharply against the sky, except where
fleecy clouds lightly draped it and fantastically blew about it. As
I ascended, and turned to look at it, its beautifully cut peak had
caught the first ray of the sun, and burned with a rosy glow. Some
great clouds drifted high in the air: the summits of the Breithorn,
the Lyscamm, and their companions, lay cold and white; but the snow
down their sides had a tinge of pink. When I stood upon the summit
of the Gorner-Grat, the two prominent silver peaks of Monte Rosa were
just touched with the sun, and its great snow-fields were visible to
the glacier at its base. The Gorner-Grat is a rounded ridge of rock,
entirely encirled by glaciers and snow-peaks. The panorama from it
is unexcelled in Switzerland.

Returning down the rocky steep, I descried, solitary in that great
waste of rock and snow, the form of a lady whom I supposed I had left
sleeping at the inn, overcome with the fatigue of yesterday's tramp.
Lured on by the apparently short distance to the backbone of the
ridge, she had climbed the rocks a mile or more above the hotel, and
come to meet me. She also had seen the great peaks lift themselves
out of the gray dawn, and Monte Rosa catch the first rays. We stood
awhile together to see how jocund day ran hither and thither along
the mountain-tops, until the light was all abroad, and then silently
turned downward, as one goes from a mount of devotion.




THE BATHS OF LEUK