firs, are inaccessible to the foot of man. The principal pass over
this enormous ridge was that of the Great St. Bernard. The traveler,
accompanied by a guide, and mounted on a mule, slowly and painfully
ascended a steep and rugged path, now crossing a narrow bridge,
spanning a fathomless abyss, again creeping along the edge of a
precipice, where the eagle soared and screamed over the fir tops
in the abyss below, and where a perpendicular wall rose to giddy
heights in the clouds above. The path at times was so narrow,
that it seemed that the mountain goat could with difficulty find a
foothold for its slender hoof. A false step, or a slip upon the icy
rocks would precipitate the traveler, a mangled corpse, a thousand
feet upon the fragments of granite in the gulf beneath. As higher
and higher he climbed these wild and rugged and cloud-enveloped
paths, borne by the unerring instinct of the faithful mule, his
steps were often arrested by the roar of the avalanche and he gazed
appalled upon its resistless rush, as rocks, and trees, and earth,
and snow, and ice, swept by him with awful and resistless desolation,
far down into the dimly discerned torrents which rushed beneath
his feet. At God's bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could
save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to
destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel's trump
could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often
swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the
traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in
snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the
fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding
sheet. Having toiled two days through such scenes of desolation
and peril, the adventurous traveler stands upon the summit of the
pass, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, two thousand
feet higher than the crest of Mount Washington, our own mountain