There was a pleasant contrast to this solemn loneliness, this silent loveliness of Nature without humanity, when the carriage drove jingling up to the inn at Lauterbrunnen, where there was all the life and bustle of a country inn at fair-time or market. Many vehicles and horses in the open space in front of the house; a long verandah, under which travellers were sitting resting after an early morning tramp from Mürren or Grindelwald; guides, with swarthy sunburnt faces, homely, good-natured, unintelligent, sitting at ease upon a long stone parapet, waiting their chances; a great fuss and noise of taking horses in and bringing horses out; a call for hay and water; a few people strolling down the road to look at the Staubach, and telling each other admiringly, inspired by the prophet Baedeker, that it is the highest unbroken fall in the world. It was very glorious in the morning sunshine, a dim rainbow-tinted arc of spray; and Daphne thought of the Witch of the Alps, and how she had worn this cloudlike fall as a garment, when she showed herself to Manfred. There was no inn there in those far-away romantic days—no odour of bad brandy and worse wine; no tourists; no cockneyism of any kind—only the sweet pastoral valley in its lonely beauty, and the solemn regions of mountain and snow rising whitely above its placid greenery, and walling it in from the commonplace earth. There was a halt of half an hour or so at Lauterbrunnen, just long enough to pay proper homage to the Staubach, and to explore the queer little primitive village, and for Daphne to burden herself with a number of souvenirs, all more or less of a staggy or goaty order, bargaining sturdily for the same with the sunburnt proprietor of a covered stall opposite the inn, whose honesty in no case demanded more than thrice the amount he was prepared to accept. By the time Daphne had concluded her transactions with this merchant of mountain _bric-à-brac_, and had made herself spiky with paper-knives and walking-sticks of the horny kind—which treasures she reluctantly surrendered to the safe keeping of an inn servant, to be packed in the carriage against her return—the steeds were ready to convey the two ladies up the mountain-path, the gentlemen being bent upon going up on foot. Daphne wanted to walk, and had just bought herself an alpenstock with that view, but Lina would not let her undertake the journey; so she handed Edgar her alpenstock, and allowed herself to be hoisted into a queer kind of saddle, with a railing round it, and Lina being similarly mounted, they began the ascent, going through more mud, just at starting, than seemed compatible with such perfect summer weather. ‘I hope, Edgar,’ said Daphne gravely, ‘that you won’t take your idea of my horsemanship from my performance on this animal, and in this saddle, or else I am afraid you’ll never let me ride Black Pearl.’