“What surprised me most,” continued the doctor, “was that the monks who live in the Hospice do not ask pay for anything they do.  The people who stop there do not even have to pay for the food that is eaten.  When I asked how much I owed for shelter and food those two days I was there, they smiled and told me there was no charge.  Of course, I could not leave in that way, and when I insisted, I learned there was a little box in the Monastery Chapel for purely volunteer offerings.  No one ever watches that box, and no one is ever asked to put anything into it.  And yet,” he finished after a little pause, “often as many as five or six hundred people have stopped at the Hospice in one day.  I was told that between twenty and twenty-five thousand people pass over the trail each year.  Then when one remembers that for a thousand years the ancestors of Prince Jan have been travelling those trails and saving lives, one can understand the splendid work of those monks and the dogs.”

“And to-day,” the little mother’s voice trembled, “dear old Prince Jan proved himself worthy of his ancestors and his heritage.”

“Barry saved forty-two lives.  His skin has been mounted and stands, wonderfully life-like, in the Museum of Berne,” the doctor said, thoughtfully.  “He did the work in the familiar places, the work he had been trained to do; but to-day, there were ninety-two lives saved by Prince Jan, with only his wonderful intelligence to guide him through the sea and make him hold fast to that rope.”

For several moments none of them spoke, but their eyes were on the dog that slept quietly at their feet, while the little three-legged kitten snuggled closely against his breast and purred loudly.

“One of the most pitiful sights at the Hospice is the House of the Dead, a short distance from the Hospice.  Those who have never been identified sleep there.  Sometimes, you see, the dogs and monks are too late, or the avalanches of melting snow uncover people who have been buried months, or even years.  The Hospice is built on solid rock, so there is no place to dig graves.  Not a tree grows within seven miles of the buildings, because it is so cold, and there is no earth for the roots.  It is a bare, desolate place at all times.”

“Jan must have been bewildered, going from such a place to a home in California,” the little mother spoke.  “And yet, see how he worked out his life and made himself worthy!”

The doctor lighted a cigar and leaned back in his big chair.  “The snow at the Hospice is not like snow in other places,” he finally said.  “You know how, usually, it clings in masses, and when trodden upon it packs firmly; but in the Alps during a storm, the snow freezes as it falls and forms into little hard pellets.  These tiny lumps of ice pile up around a traveller, and when he tries to push onward he sinks as though in a bed of quicksand.  Unless help is at hand he soon is buried out of sight.