thinking their solemn thoughts with their heads in the drifting clouds, but the villages at their feet—­when the painstaking eye could trace them up and find them—­were so reduced, almost invisible, and lay so flat against the ground, that the exactest simile I can devise is to compare them to ant-deposits of granulated dirt overshadowed by the huge bulk of a cathedral.  The steamboats skimming along under the stupendous precipices were diminished by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sailboats and rowboats to shallops proper for fairies that keep house in the cups of lilies and ride to court on the backs of bumblebees.

Presently we came upon half a dozen sheep nibbling grass in the spray of a stream of clear water that sprang from a rock wall a hundred feet high, and all at once our ears were startled with a melodious “Lul ... l ... l l l llul-lul-LAhee-o-o-o!” pealing joyously from a near but invisible source, and recognized that we were hearing for the first time the famous Alpine jodel in its own native wilds.  And we recognized, also, that it was that sort of quaint commingling of baritone and falsetto which at home we call “Tyrolese warbling.”

The jodeling (pronounced yOdling—­emphasis on the O) continued, and was very pleasant and inspiriting to hear.  Now the jodeler appeared—­a shepherd boy of sixteen —­and in our gladness and gratitude we gave him a franc to jodel some more.  So he jodeled and we listened.  We moved on, presently, and he generously jodeled us out of sight.  After about fifteen minutes we came across another shepherd boy who was jodeling, and gave him half a franc to keep it up.  He also jodeled us out of sight.  After that, we found a jodeler every ten minutes; we gave the first one eight cents, the second one six cents, the third one four, the fourth one a penny, contributed nothing to Nos. 5, 6, and 7, and during the remainder of the day hired the rest of the jodelers, at a franc apiece, not to jodel any more.  There is somewhat too much of the jodeling in the Alps.

About the middle of the afternoon we passed through a prodigious natural gateway called the Felsenthor, formed by two enormous upright rocks, with a third lying across the top.  There was a very attractive little hotel close by, but our energies were not conquered yet, so we went on.

Three hours afterward we came to the railway-track.  It was planted straight up the mountain with the slant of a ladder that leans against a house, and it seemed to us that man would need good nerves who proposed to travel up it or down it either.

During the latter part of the afternoon we cooled our roasting interiors with ice-cold water from clear streams, the only really satisfying water we had tasted since we left home, for at the hotels on the continent they merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in, and that only modifies its hotness, doesn’t make it cold.  Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.  Europeans say ice-water impairs digestion.  How do they know?—­they never drink any.