I needed exercise, so I employed my agent in setting stranded logs and dead trees adrift, and I sat on a boulder and watched them go whirling and leaping head over heels down the boiling torrent.  It was a wonderfully exhilarating spectacle.  When I had had enough exercise, I made the agent take some, by running a race with one of those logs.  I made a trifle by betting on the log.

After dinner we had a walk up and down the Kandersteg valley, in the soft gloaming, with the spectacle of the dying lights of day playing about the crests and pinnacles of the still and solemn upper realm for contrast, and text for talk.  There were no sounds but the dulled complaining of the torrent and the occasional tinkling of a distant bell.  The spirit of the place was a sense of deep, pervading peace; one might dream his life tranquilly away there, and not miss it or mind it when it was gone.

The summer departed with the sun, and winter came with the stars.  It grew to be a bitter night in that little hotel, backed up against a precipice that had no visible top to it, but we kept warm, and woke in time in the morning to find that everybody else had left for Gemmi three hours before —­so our little plan of helping that German family (principally the old man) over the pass, was a blocked generosity.

CHAPTER XXXIV [The World’s Highest Pig Farm]

We hired the only guide left, to lead us on our way.  He was over seventy, but he could have given me nine-tenths of his strength and still had all his age entitled him to.  He shouldered our satchels, overcoats, and alpenstocks, and we set out up the steep path.  It was hot work.  The old man soon begged us to hand over our coats and waistcoats to him to carry, too, and we did it; one could not refuse so little a thing to a poor old man like that; he should have had them if he had been a hundred and fifty.

When we began that ascent, we could see a microscopic chalet perched away up against heaven on what seemed to be the highest mountain near us.  It was on our right, across the narrow head of the valley.  But when we got up abreast it on its own level, mountains were towering high above on every hand, and we saw that its altitude was just about that of the little Gasternthal which we had visited the evening before.  Still it seemed a long way up in the air, in that waste and lonely wilderness of rocks.  It had an unfenced grass-plot in front of it which seemed about as big as a billiard-table, and this grass-plot slanted so sharply downward, and was so brief, and ended so exceedingly soon at the verge of the absolute precipice, that it was a shuddery thing to think of a person’s venturing to trust his foot on an incline so situated at all.  Suppose a man stepped on an orange peel in that yard; there would be nothing for him to seize; nothing could keep him from rolling; five revolutions would bring him to the edge, and