‘Poor little colourless ice-blossom, so pale and dull-looking, like a life without joy or variety!’ she said. ‘They say that it grows under the snow. How nice it would be to go and hunt for it oneself! Please give the children plenty of money, Edgar.’ And Mr. Turchill, whose pockets were always full of loose Helvetian coins—leaden sous and dingy-looking half-francs—scattered his largesse among the natives with a liberality rare in modern excursionists. Half-way up the hill they came to a rustic restaurant, where the horses stopped to blow, and where the coachman invited the ladies to go and see a tame chamois in a little shed at the back of the house. ‘He will be the first of his race I have seen,’ said Daphne, ‘though in Manfred’s time this part of the country seems to have been overrun by them.’ They went through the restaurant kitchen to the shed behind it, to see the four-footed mountaineer. He was a melancholy little animal, altogether a shabby specimen of the chamois tribe, and looked sadly forlorn in his narrow den. One of his horns had been broken off, perhaps in the struggles that attended his capture. ‘It is a painful sight,’ said Daphne, turning away with a sigh. She would have given all her pocket-money to set the chamois free; but he was one of the attractions of the house, and could not have been easily ransomed. And now again across the Black Lutschine, by another covered bridge, and up the steep winding road through a narrow gorge in the hills, until the cleft widens, and the Grindelwald valley opens before them in all its glory, ringed round with mountains, the Great Eiger standing boldly out in front of them, with broad patches of snow on his dark stony front, behind a bold edge of pine-clad hill. There is unspeakable grandeur in that bleak and rugged mountain rising above the verdure and beauty of the nearer hills. Daphne clasped her hands in unalloyed delight. ‘It would be worth while coming to Switzerland if it were only for this,’ she exclaimed; ‘yet I am tortured by the idea of all the mountain-passes, glaciers, and waterfalls that we are not going to see. I have a great mind to throw away my Baedeker. He makes me positively miserable with suggestions that I can’t carry out.’ ‘You will be able to see all you care about next year,’ said Edgar, ‘when you and I are free to go where we like. I believe it will be always where _you_ like.’ ‘Next year seems half a century off,’ she answered carelessly.