There are few more pleasurable sensations than to be comfortable and warm under the lee of some great boulder, watching the stars as they slowly move westward; or to sit by a camp fire after the sun has set, and to recall all the enjoyment of the climb just finished; a feeling of most profound contentment with everything in the world steals over the party; the conversation becomes more and more disjointed as first one and then another turns over and sleeps. When I look back and think of all the various places where Mummery, Hastings, Slingsby, and I have slept out in the open, far away from the haunts of men, and remember how we enjoyed ourselves, I for one would go back year after year to the Alps if those times could be brought back again. In those days the glass of time, when shaken, ran in golden sands. Now all that is left of them is the memory. It was in those days long ago, that I remember, how on one perfect evening at the beginning of August, we camped high up by the side of the Brenva glacier, having been well prepared for struggling with the tremendous southern face of Mont Blanc by the delightful dinners of M. Bertolini. The sun went down behind the Pétéret ridge--a ridge which always seems to me to be unsurpassed in the Alps--and we hoped that in another twenty-four hours we should be on the other side of the great mountain. But one of the great charms of mountaineering is its uncertainty, and instead of twenty-four it was forty-eight hours before we arrived at the Grands-Mulets. It would be distinctly perverting the truth to say that, at the time, we enjoyed the whole of our expedition, but often have I during winter evenings recalled that climb. I cannot now reproduce the unpleasant sensations, but the satisfaction and recollection of success becomes more pleasing as lapse of years adds enchantment to the memory of that fierce battle with Mont Blanc. I shall never forget how, hour after hour, Mummery, following a wrong direction of E. Rey's (who, as it turned out afterwards, had never been up Mont Blanc by this Brenva route), persistently kept towards the left; how at last the hard blue ice became so steep that it was almost impossible to cut steps in it; and how the ice also had a sticky feel when touched with the fingers, for we were in the shadow of the mountain.