But now we have reached the summit, and the tired horses are brought to a halt in front of the little hotel where we are to have our mid-day meal. The village is a tiny one, of a dozen houses or so. The hotel does not look especially attractive, and the meal is even less appetizing than the appearance of the building has led us to expect. For once in our life we refuse chicken--at least we are content with one mouthful. Without attempting to file a bill of particulars, it is enough to say that the interval between the death of that bird and its appearance on the table as food has been unduly prolonged. With absolute unanimity the guests abjure chicken, for that meal at least. The food is so sublimely bad that every one laughs, and even our foreign friends who refused to respond to our advances of the previous evening join in the merriment. Somehow, during the course of the meal, we are led to speak of our nationality, and then comes the revelation. “Americans?” cries the hitherto unfriendly foreigner. “Americans?” echoes his wife, who up to this time had not been supposed to understand a word of English. The mystery is solved. This gentleman and his wife are Hollanders and have taken us for English. It is at the time when the English-Boer war is at its height, and the Hollander has no dealings with the Englishman if he can help it. The gentleman is an Amsterdam physician, and a man of culture and wide reading. His evident effort to be friendly reaches a climax when he tells us of his hotel at Brieg, where we are to spend the night, and assures us that there we will be certain to have trout for dinner. Now for the last half of the trip! We have only just left the hotel when the diligence is stopped and the passengers are asked to get out and walk for a mile across the debris of an avalanche which came thundering down from the terminal moraines of the Ross Boden glacier the previous spring. The diligence sways and lurches and thumps along, while we pick our way over stones and ice and around giant rocks. Halfway across we meet a young man who has spent nearly all of his waking hours for months past in search for the body of his sister who met her death under the sudden sweep of the avalanche.