been to you, it is still worse for me, knowing that the woman who thus scrubs, and with so much din, is my poor dead wife. Her brain, when she was alive, was quite turned about cleaning. She could not even go to church with me and the neighbors, but must stay at home and clean. So, being a bad manager, and not washing her soul white, she seems unfit for heaven, and must needs come here every night to continue her work. Even masses don't seem to help her.'" Such tales were either related by the hut-fire on airy mountain or in the fir woods. Moidel might have told us ghost-stories in the barn at night, but there, in the solitary darkness, they appeared to her too horribly real, especially with sleepy auditors, who might any moment drop into unconsciousness, leaving her in a dismal fright over her own tale. One afternoon, accompanied by this faithful companion, we determined to attack the summit of the mountain, which in a mantle of fir wood rose immediately behind the huts. We were anxious to see what lay on the other side, but after a hard though exhilarating climb we learned that the mountain was but a huge overhanging shoulder, the rocky head of the giant rising up in the midst of wide sweeping moors some six miles distant. We changed, therefore, the object of our excursion, determining to visit the highest Olm of the district, Ober Kofel. Turning to the left, we pursued the moorland plateau until in half an hour we had reached a solitary white cabin. The door was firmly closed, but a pile of fire-wood and a rake, evidently flung recently down, were sufficient signs of habitation. A more lonely scene could not well be conceived. No trees nor flowers, only some yellow thistles growing by the side of a murmuring brook, which had persistently gone rushing on until it had worn the pebbles in its bed flat and thin. Tawny, dun-colored mountains rose behind, but before the hut the _trät_ or open space, covered with the greenest turf, extended to a platform of rocks, where the glossy shrubs of the mountain rhododendron grew, presenting a scene well worth the climb. The view outward embraced the deep wooded gorge of the Giessbach, revealing far beyond the black, sinuous lines of distant mountains, cutting across the evening horizon. Black-brown crags some eight thousand feet high, peaked with snow, rose to the right; but the great snow spectacle was to the left. There the proud crests of the Hoch Gall, Wild Gall and Schnebige Nock rose out of a vast white glittering amphitheatre, a peculiar, bare, conical rock standing like an Alpine sphinx strangely forth from this desert of snow.