[Swindling the Coroner]

A great and priceless thing is a new interest! How
it takes possession of a man! how it clings to him,
how it rides him! I strode onward from the Schwarenbach
hostelry a changed man, a reorganized personality.
I walked into a new world, I saw with new eyes.
I had been looking aloft at the giant show-peaks only as
things to be worshiped for their grandeur and magnitude,
and their unspeakable grace of form; I looked up at
them now, as also things to be conquered and climbed.
My sense of their grandeur and their noble beauty
was neither lost nor impaired; I had gained a new
interest in the mountains without losing the old ones.
I followed the steep lines up, inch by inch, with my eye,
and noted the possibility or impossibility of following
them with my feet. When I saw a shining helmet of ice
projecting above the clouds, I tried to imagine I saw
files of black specks toiling up it roped together with a
gossamer thread.

We skirted the lonely little lake called the Daubensee,
and presently passed close by a glacier on the right
--a thing like a great river frozen solid in its flow
and broken square off like a wall at its mouth.
I had never been so near a glacier before.

Here we came upon a new board shanty, and found some men
engaged in building a stone house; so the Schwarenbach was
soon to have a rival. We bought a bottle or so of beer here;