Swiss artists have endeavored to reproduce the grandeur and variety of Alpine views, especially in the masterly Aquarelles of Lory.  The English reader will find them admirably well described and illustrated in Dr. Tyndall’s work upon the glaciers.  They are known throughout the Alps as “glacier-tables”; and many a time my fellow-travellers and I have spread our frugal meal on such a table, erected, as it seemed, especially for our convenience.

Another curious effect is that produced by small stones or pebbles, small enough to become heated through by the sun in summer.  Such a heated pebble will of course melt the ice below it, and so wear a hole for itself into which it sinks.  This process will continue as long as the sun reaches the pebble with force enough to heat it.  Numbers of such deep, round holes, like organ-pipes, varying in size from the diameter of a minute pebble or a grain of coarse sand to that of an ordinary stone, are found on the glacier, and at the bottom of each is the pebble by which it was bored.  The ice formed by the freezing of water collecting in such holes and in the fissures of the surface is a pure crystallized ice, very different in color from the ice of the great mass of the glacier produced by snow; and sometimes, after a rain and frost, the surface of a glacier looks like a mosaic-work, in consequence of such veins and cylinders or spots of clear ice with which it is inlaid.

Indeed, the aspect of the glacier changes constantly with the different conditions of the temperature.  We may see it, when, during a long dry season, it has collected upon its surface all sorts of light floating materials, as dust, sand, and the like, so that it looks dull and soiled,—­or when a heavy rain has washed the surface clean from all impurities and left it bright and fresh.  We may see it when the heat and other disintegrating influences have acted upon the ice to a certain superficial depth, so that its surface is covered with a decomposed crust of broken, snowy ice, so permeated with air that it has a dead-white color, like pounded ice or glass.  Those who see the glacier in this state miss the blue tint so often described as characteristic of its appearance in its lower portion, and as giving such a peculiar beauty to its caverns and vaults.  But let them come again after a summer storm has swept away this loose sheet of broken, snowy ice above, and before the same process has had time to renew it, and they will find the compact, solid surface of the glacier of as pure a blue as if it reflected the sky above.  We may see it in the early dawn, before the new ice of the preceding night begins to yield to the action of the sun, and the surface of the glacier is veined and inlaid with the water poured into its holes and fissures during the day and transformed into pure, fresh ice during the night,—­or when the noonday heat has wakened all its streams, and rivulets sometimes as large as rivers rush along its surface, find their way to the lower extremity of the glacier, or, dashing down some gaping crevasse or open well, are lost beneath the ice.