And did I know what the heart of a man does when his head is cut off? I (who was wondering at his sudden turn to these queer scientific matters) said I supposed that the heart stops beating. But Milton Rhodes said no; the organ continues its pulsations for an hour or longer. And had I heard of Spallanzani's very curious experiment with the crow? I never had, but I wanted to. Spallanzani, Milton told me, gave a crow a good feed and then chopped its head off. (That decapitation didn't surprise me any, for I knew that Spallanzani was a real scientist.) The body was placed in a temperature the same as that of the living bird and kept there for six hours. Spallanzani then took the body out, opened it and found that the food which he had given the bird was thoroughly digested. "These scientists," was my comment, "are queer birds themselves." Then he told me some strange things about sympathetic vibrations--that a drinking-glass can be smashed by the human voice (I knew that) that an alpine avalanche can be started thundering down by the tinkle of a bell; and so, as Tyndall tells us, the muleteers in the Swiss mountains silence the bells of their animals when in proximity to such danger. And he told me of that musician who came near destroying the Colebrook Dale suspension bridge _with his fiddle_.[5] [Footnote 5: "When the bridge at Colebrook Dale (the first iron bridge in the world) was building, a fiddler came along and said to the workmen that he could fiddle their bridge down. The builders thought this boast a fiddle-de-dee, and invited the itinerant musician to fiddle away to his heart's content. One note after another was struck upon the strings until one was found with which the bridge was in sympathy. When the bridge began to shake violently, the incredulous workmen were alarmed at the unexpected result, and ordered the fiddler to stop."--Prof. J. Lovering.] Then came the strangest thing of all--the story of Vogt's cricket. The professor severed the body of a cricket (a living cricket, of course) into two pieces, and the fore part then turned round and _ate up the hinder_! "Yes," Milton Rhodes said, "Science has some queer stories to tell." "I should say that she has!" "And maybe," he added, "she'll have a stranger one than ever to tell when we get back--that is, if we ever do." We passed McClure's Rock, height about seven thousand four hundred feet; made our way along the head of a small glacier, which fell away towards the Nisqually; ascended the cleaver, at this point very low and along the base of which we had been moving; and there, on the other side and coming up within a few yards of the spot where we stood, was the Paradise Glacier, white and beautiful in the sunlight. Milton Rhodes gave me an inquiring look. "Recognize this spot?" he queried.