[Illustration:  VERTICAL SECTION OF THE GLACIERE OF GRACE-DIEU, NEAR BESANCON.]

The three large masses of ice which rendered this glaciere in some respects more remarkable than any of those I have seen, lay in a line from east to west, across the middle of the cave, on that part of the floor where the ice was thickest.  The central mass was extremely solid, but somewhat unmeaning in shape, being a rough irregular pyramid; its size alone, however, was sufficient to make it very striking, the girth being 66-1/2 feet at some distance from the ice-floor with which it blended.  The mass which lay to the east of this was very lovely, owing to the good taste of some one who had found that much ice was wont to accumulate on that spot, and had accordingly fixed the trunk of a small fir-tree, with the upper branches complete, to receive the water from the corresponding fissure in the roof.  The consequence was, that, while the actual tree had vanished from sight under its icy covering, excepting on one side where a slight investigation betrayed its presence, the mass of ice showed every possible fantasy of form which a mould so graceful could suggest.  At the base, it was solid, with a circumference of 37 feet.  The huge column, which had collected round the trunk of the fir-tree, branched out at the top into all varieties of eccentricity and beauty, each twig of the different boughs becoming, to all appearance, a solid bar of frosted ice, with graceful curve, affording a point of suspension for complicated groups of icicles, which streamed down side by side with emulous loveliness.  In some of the recesses of the column, the ice assumed a pale blue colour; but as a rule it was white and very hard, not so regularly prismatic as the ice described in former glacieres, but palpably crystalline, showing a structure not unlike granite, with a bold grain, and with a large predominance of the glittering element.  But the westernmost mass was the grandest and most beautiful of all.  It consisted of two lofty heads, like weeping willows in Carrara marble, with three or four others less lofty, resembling a family group of lions’ heads in a subdued attitude of grief, richly decked with icy manes.  Similar heads seemed to grow out here and there from the solid sides of the huge mass.  The girth was 76-1/2 feet, measured about 2 feet from the floor.  When this column was looked at from the side removed from the entrance to the cave, so that it stood in the centre of the light which poured down the long slope from the outer world, the transparency of the ice brought it to pass that the whole seemed set in a narrow frame of impalpable liquid blue, the effect of light penetrating through the mass at its extreme edges.  The only means of determining the height of this column was by tying a stone to the end of a string, and lodging it on the highest head; but this was not an easy process, as I was naturally anxious not to injure the delicate beauty which made that head one of the loveliest things