And now Harris’s contrary nature and inborn selfishness were striking manifested.  He has no spirit of self-denial.  He began straight off, and continued for an hour, to express his gratitude that the child was not destroyed.  I never saw such a man.  That was the kind of person he was; just so he was gratified, he never cared anything about anybody else.  I had noticed that trait in him, over and over again.  Often, of course, it was mere heedlessness, mere want of reflection.  Doubtless this may have been the case in most instances, but it was not the less hard to bar on that account—­and after all, its bottom, its groundwork, was selfishness.  There is no avoiding that conclusion.  In the instance under consideration, I did think the indecency of running on in that way might occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad, that was sufficient—­he cared not a straw for my feelings, or my loss of such a literary plum, snatched from my very mouth at the instant it was ready to drop into it.  His selfishness was sufficient to place his own gratification in being spared suffering clear before all concern for me, his friend.  Apparently, he did not once reflect upon the valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall to me:  fishing the child out—­witnessing the surprise of the family and the stir the thing would have made among the peasants—­then a Swiss funeral—­then the roadside monument, to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it.  And we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal.  I was silent.  I was too much hurt to complain.  If he could act so, and be so heedless and so frivolous at such a time, and actually seem to glory in it, after all I had done for him, I would have cut my hand off before I would let him see that I was wounded.

We were approaching Zermatt; consequently, we were approaching the renowned Matterhorn.  A month before, this mountain had been only a name to us, but latterly we had been moving through a steadily thickening double row of pictures of it, done in oil, water, chromo, wood, steel, copper, crayon, and photography, and so it had at length become a shape to us—­and a very distinct, decided, and familiar one, too.  We were expecting to recognize that mountain whenever or wherever we should run across it.  We were not deceived.  The monarch was far away when we first saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him.  He has the rare peculiarity of standing by himself; he is peculiarly steep, too, and is also most oddly shaped.  He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge, with the upper third of its blade bent a little to the left.  The broad base of this monster wedge is planted upon a grand glacier-paved Alpine platform whose elevation is ten thousand feet above sea-level; as the wedge itself is some five thousand feet high, it follows that its apex is about fifteen thousand feet above sea-level.  So the whole bulk of this stately piece of rock, this sky-cleaving