apt to overlook, and she found additional pleasure in pointing them out to the ingenuous and wondering Christine, who received these, her first, lessons in that grand communion with nature which is pregnant with so much unalloyed delight, with gratitude and a readiness of comprehension, that amply repaid her instructress.  Sigismund was an attentive and pleased listener to what was passing, though one who had so often passed the mountains, and who had seen them familiarly on their warmer and more sunny side, had little to learn, himself, even from so skilful and alluring a teacher.

As they ascended, the air became purer and less impregnated with the humidity of its lower currents; changing, by a process as fine as that wrought by a chemical application, the hues and aspect of every object in the view.  A vast hill-side lay basking in the sun, which illuminated on its rounded swells a hundred long stripes of grain in every stage of verdure, resembling so much delicate velvet that was thrown in a variety of accidental faces to the light, while the shadows ran away, to speak technically, from this foyer de lumiere of the picture, in gradations of dusky russet and brown, until the colonne de vigueur was obtained in the deep black cast from the overhanging branches of a wood of larch in the depths of some ravine, into which the sight with difficulty penetrated.  These were the beauties on which Adelheid most loved to dwell, for they are always the charms that soonest strike the true admirer of nature, when he finds himself raised above the lower and less purified strata of the atmosphere, into the regions of more radiant light and brightness.  It is thus that the physical, no less than the moral, vision becomes elevated above the impurities that cling to this nether world, attaining a portion of that spotless and sublime perception as we ascend, by which we are nearly assimilated to the truths of creation; a poetical type of the greater and purer enjoyment we feel, as morally receding from earth we draw nearer to heaven.

The party rested for several hours, as usual, at the little mountain hamlet of Liddes.  At the present time, it is not uncommon for the traveller, favored by a wheel-track along this portion of the route, to ascend the mountain and to return to Martigny in the same day.  The descent in particular, after reaching the village just named, is soon made; but at the period of our tale, such an exploit, if ever made, was of very rare occurrence.  The fatigue of being in the saddle so many hours compelled our party to remain at the inn much longer than is now practised, and their utmost hope was to be able to reach the convent before the last rays of the sun had ceased to light the glittering peak of Velan.