they took him once more before the man whom the populace called Il Mastino. The old soldier held out to him, trembling, the fifteen francs, the coppers filling his quivering hands.

me,' he said. 'I could not get Would you take it and let me night to pay the rest; I will go

'My neighbours have helped any more. It is fifteen francs. have him? I will work day and without bread. Oh! for the love of God, do let me have him, the poor, poor innocent thing!'

The man whom they called Il Mastino swore a fierce oath, and yelled to him, 'Out of the place, you beggar! If you say one word more, I will blow the brains out of your dog, and if one shot does not do for him he shall have two; he shall have three! I am the master here.'

Then he had Gualdro put out of the gates.

The old man stood in the blazing sun, mute and blind as a statue is. No hope was left him; nothing but a blank despair.

A lady passed by half an hour later, and saw him still there. She was a stranger in the city, but she was struck by the strange look of the old soldier standing in the full sun, his eyes fixed on vacancy, his medals hanging on his rough blue shirt, his hands full of coins.

She paused, touched his arm, and asked if he were ill.

He drew his breath with effort, and stared upon her stupidly; she spoke to him again, and he understood.

He told her his tale.

She was in haste, and could not wait there, but she read truth in every word he spoke, in every line of his worn ashen face; she drew out her purse, and poured thirty francs into his hand, and bade him be of good hope.

With that you must get your dog. They cannot refuse you, surely. Go in and show them you have all they ask.'

Gualdro listened bewildered and incredulous; then an immense joy broke in on him.

It is the Madonna herself that helps me, come in human guise!' he cried, and would have stooped and kissed the hem of her garment, but she was already gone with the summer light on her path.

Gualdro drew himself erect, smoothed out the notes, and with his pulses beating high and firm, knocked once more at the gates of the place of death.

It was now full noon.

'I have brought the money—all the money,' he shouted aloud. Now he is safe; now he is mine. I have all the money!'

Everyone in the yard was silent.

'I have all the money,' he cried again. Our Lady has come

on earth in a woman's shape, a woman with fair hair. I have all the money. Dear sirs, take the money and give me my dog; let me see my dog.'

The tyrant whom the populace called Il Mastino came forward; he looked sullen, angry, and ashamed.

'Your dog is dead,' he said.

'Dead!'

The word rang through the yard far above the lowing of cattle, the shrieks of swine, the bleating of lambs, the shouting of men.

'He choked himself with his chain; it was an accident,' said the tyrant, and his face flushed with heavy rage; he was safe in saying it; who could prove that the dog had been poisoned? The teeth of Gualdro set; his eyes blazed with a fearful light; his face was dark and terrible as on a day of battle his foes had seen it. 'Bring out my dog,' he said. Bring out my dog, living or dead.' Awe fell upon the people.

Show him the dog,' said the tyrant with a dull shame upon his sullen face. There was silence, and on it the heavy breathing of the old man sounded like the breathing of an ox that has been struck with the pole-axe but not killed.

Then they brought the dog to his master. He was dead. His eyes protruded, his mouth foamed, his body was swollen. Never more would Drummer sit on the sands by the river and watch the children play.

Gualdro stooped, looked, kissed the poor disfigured swollen body as he would have kissed a little dead child. Then he rose up, and with one mighty blow struck the tyrant who had killed his old comrade backward to the earth.

As he did so he laughed aloud.

'He fought the Austrians, he and I! We fought for Freedom!' And with those words he choked, and dropped down dead, by the side of his dead dog.

The wise men who cut up dogs alive said he had died of heat apoplexy; the people of Pignone knew better than that. The poison-swelled body of Drummer was thrown out to swell a manureheap; the body of his master was cast into the common deathditch of the poor of the city. The bedridden wife died very soon; the little children, starving and miserable, were taken by people who had not bread enough to feed themselves. No one noticed, no one lamented; an old soldier and a dog were missed a little while by a few people from the sandy shore by the river, and one little child said often for a week, 'Why did not To-to come back? gave my whole centime.' That was all.

I

The old hero had had his reward!

60

A Quiet Day in the Alps.1

WE had only a week to spend in Switzerland. The weather had long been very bad. We could not try the high peaks-as Dent Blanche-that we most desired to achieve; and so we resolved one evening, which promised a fine day for the morrow, to walk up the Zmutt glacier and to visit the famed Stockje hut. This little walk may be worth its word of record.

The walk from Zermatt to the Stockje may be compassed, even with ladies, in five hours; while the return journey, which is mainly down-hill work, may be performed in an hour less. A very early start is, therefore, not necessary. If you get off by six, or even by seven o'clock, you can accomplish your purpose, allowing ample time for lunch at the hut, and for pauses of enjoyment on the way, and can yet be back at the Monte Rosa Hôtel in time for table d'hôte. It was a little after six o'clock on a fine morning in September that we started for a quiet day in the Alps. Last year (1878) fine days had been very rare in the Zermatt region. It was, in fact, the worst year known in the Alps since 1860; and yet there have been some bad years between the two dates. Very little was done in mountaineering in 1878. It was a barren year for climbers generally. When we arrived at Zermatt, Matterhorn had been ascended once; Weisshorn and Dent Blanche not at all; nor were they, I believe, afterwards climbed in 1878. Happily for us, we found for our little expedition a softly brilliant morning, which mellowed into a glorious day;-one of the few fine days of a disastrous year.

I have been very fortunate, during a rather long career of Alpine climbing, in friends and comrades. Memory fondly summons up, first, the figure-absent in 1878-of that dear friend and supreme mountaineer, Lyvetête; while other companions of the years of yore are recalled to thought as I gaze again on well-known, proudly conquered, unchanging peaks. One of the old friends, connected pleasantly with many a mountain

For to myself mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them my affections are wholly bound. . . . To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's working-to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment-are the higher missions of the mountains. It is impossible to examine in their connected system the features of even the most ordinary mountain scenery, without concluding that it has been prepared in order to unite as far as possible, and in the closest compass, every means of delighting and sanctifying the heart of man.'-RUSKIN.

reminiscence, survived into last year's brief tour, and went with me to the Stockje. He is a master of all classic lore, and fair old Winchester knows and loves him well. In the old day of gladness and of glee-concerning which he who lists to do so may consult Alpine Ascents and Adventures'-this particular friend had been christened 'M. D.'; and his diploma is still in force in intimate, affectionate intercourse. Few men that I know have a keener mental sympathy with all Switzerland, or a stronger delight in great or little walking, than the lovable M. D.

We had with us a gentleman and lady, friends of the M. D.; and we had a something between a porter and a guide, to show the way across the glacier and to carry provisions to the hut. This function was performed by the young giant Elias, who had been with me before, as porter, on one or two high expeditions, including a bivouac upon the Rothhorn. Our lady was mounted on a horse, and chatted with us from the serene but swaying elevation of a saddle.

The morning is fresh and fair. The sun is not yet high, and is, therefore, not yet hot;-but he will be both anon. We soon get clear of the picturesque outskirts of dear old Zermatt, and pass the last of the Sennütten, or barns. As we pass by him we take the invariable and unavoidable glance at the wonder and the terror of the mystic Matterhorn. Peasant women, clad in faded, weatherstained, well-worn blue garments, toil along the stony path with great heaps of freshly-cut grass borne upon bent backs and bowed heads. On our left the rushing river rolls for ever its vexed, abounding tide. On little shallows of fine grey sand the turbid waters of the eddies lap and gurgle in gentle pulsations, while the main torrent hustles along upon its mad, wild way to the far Rhone and to the distant sea. We mount gently up a path of deep, sandy, dusty softness, which rises suavely until it runs high above the banks of raging Visp. The river will be fuller and fiercer far when the solving sun shall have melted the glaciers now tensely bound in the iron frost-bands of the cold, dark night. Below us, between path and stream, are pines-the eternal sapin of the Alps--some standing up so high that their feathery tops rise not above our busy feet; others, storm-smitten, broken from their rocky roothold, lie supine, stretched downwards in piteous ruin and in stranded wreck. On the opposite bank the pines stand up thickly in their chilly greenery. We approach the rude Matterhorn bridge, composed simply of rough logs laid across unshapen wooden supports. Beyond it the foaming river winds in a sharp sudden curve, and belts of pines close around and shut in the narrowed view. The mad, insensate river, hurrying desper

ately along from glacier to ocean, urged by blind impulse rather than by conscious purpose, hurls its wild, opaque, frenzied whirl of waters over and around the rock-blocks which seek in vain to oppose its headlong course. So heedless is it of its real aim, that side-jets of harassed whirlpools, let and hindered from direct progress with the main current, gush out in petulant anger from the hollows and the bays which vainly urge them to pause and rest.

We cross the bending bridge, standing high above the foaming rush and never-silent roar; we leave the turbulent, nerve-stirring water down-rush, and we rise over soft mounds of yellowish green grass, down which narrow channels of bright, agitated water thinly pour. These meadows are all thickly studded with wild flowers of a cerulean blue; that is, these flowers look blue when seen in a mass, but are found, on individual inspection, to be of that streaky violet or purple hue which darkens the colour of the summer sky when that is seen in the Alps from high snow-basins or lofty rock-hollows.

These are not, perhaps, exactly Novalis's blue flower' of poetry; but they are akin to that. How finely Nature always composes in colour! This sunbright grass sets off exquisitely the bluish, starry, chance-sown, but lovely and lowly wild flower;— which is, I believe, a kind of autumn crocus.

Next we leave on our left, as we pass along in welcome shade, a clump of wet pine-woods, and we attain to a rough, rising, winding path. At a certain point-known well to M. D. and myself-we pass the beginning of the way which leads to the terrible, grim Matterhorn.

The green path winds through a wood, sloping from left to right, and mounts until you reach its highest altitude. After that it rises and falls, but tends generally downwards. You cross one waterfall, set in a little bay ravine on your left; and you notice how the thick sheet of water drops downward with a seeming slow pause, and, at the end of a dropping leap, shivers into bubble, spray, and threaded foam, like the droop of a rocket-shower. The way becomes very green, and is in cool, dark shade. Your step is on soft grass; you are screened by foliage, and all around grow, thickly, rhododendrons, alders, and many another shrub. Butterflies zigzag their flickering flight across the greenly shadowy air. The green thicket slopes widely upward on your left, while, on the right hand, the wooded level ends suddenly in sheer, deep precipice. Far, far below, the river, soundless now, shows like a grey-white thread of seeming stagnant foam. It, too, tearing along in its remote depths, is in cool, deep shade. Down the steep side of the lofty precipice grow stunted shrubs and stately trees. The rich