Ere long he reached the magnificent glacier of the Rhone; a frozen cataract, more than two thousand feet in height, and many miles broad at its base.  It fills the whole valley between two mountains, running back to their summits.  At the base it is arched, like a dome; and above, jagged and rough, and resembles a mass of gigantic crystals, of a pale emerald tint, mingled with white.  A snowy crust covers its surface; but at every rent and crevice the pale green ice shines clear in thesun.  Its shape is that of a glove, lying with the palm downwards, and the fingers crooked and close together.  It is a gauntlet of ice, which, centuries ago, Winter, the King of these mountains, threw down in defiance to the Sun; and year by year the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the ground on the point of his glittering spear.  A feeling of wonder and delight came over the soul of Flemming when he beheld it, and he shouted and cried aloud;

“How wonderful! how glorious!”

After lingering a few hours in the cold, desolate valley, he climbed in the afternoon the steep Mayen-Wand, on the Grimsel, passed the Lake of the Dead, with its ink-black waters; and through the melting snow, and over slippery stepping-stones in the beds of numberless shallow brooks, descended to the Grimsel Hospital, where he passed the night, and thought it the most lone and desolate spot, that man ever slept in.

On the morrow, he rose with the day; and the rising sun found him already standing on the rusticbridge, which hangs over the verge of the Falls of the Aar at Handeck, where the river pitches down a precipice into a narrow and fearful abyss, shut in by perpendicular cliffs.  At right angles with it comes the beautiful Aerlenbach; and halfway down the double cascade mingles into one.  Thus he pursued his way down the Hasli Thal into the Bernese Oberland, restless, impatient, he knew not why, stopping seldom, and never long, and then rushing forward again, like the rushing river whose steps he followed, and in whose ice-cold waters ever and anon he bathed his wrists, to cool the fever in his blood; for the noonday sun was hot.

His heart dilated in the dilating valley, that grew broader and greener at every step.  The sight of human faces and human dwellings soothed him; and through the fields of summer grain, in the broad meadows of Imgrund, he walked with a heart that ached no more, but trembled only, as our eyelids when we have done weeping.  As he climbed the opposite hill, which hems in this romanticvalley, and, like a heavy yoke, chafes the neck of the Aar, he believed the ancient tradition, which says, that once the valley was a lake.  From the summit of the hill he looked southward upon a beautiful landscape of gardens, and fields of grain, and woodlands, and meadows, and the ancient castle of Resti, looking down upon Meyringen.  And now all around him were the singing of birds, and grateful shadows of the leafy trees; and sheeted waterfalls