When the cover of the basket was lifted off in the station, the body of a man swathed in a blanket was revealed. He was unable to speak, but a note pinned to the blanket stated that he had been struck in the stomach with a shell fragment just outside the engine-house, and that nothing had been done save to wrap enough gauze around his middle to hold the riven abdomen together and bundle him into the waiting _teleferica_ basket. “He must have been wounded not over fifteen minutes ago, and within less than a mile in an air-line from here,” commented the chief surgeon. “We might have heard the detonation of the shell that did it. Five minutes one way or the other in operating may mean the difference between life and death in a case of this kind, and the chances are that the _teleferica_ has given us the necessary margin.” Before I left the hospital, an hour later, the operation was over, and the man was resting comfortably, with every hope of recovery. On several occasions, going up by a _teleferica_, I have passed a little Red Cross basket going down with a _ferito_, or wounded man (indeed, the occupant of one of these to whom I endeavoured to shout a few words of good cheer in Italian reported below that he had been accosted by an unmistakable _Tedesco_); but by far the queerest passenger it was my lot to “balance” against was one I encountered during an attempt I made to get up the Pasubio on a stormy day last January. It was snowing at the rate of four or five inches an hour, and the air was thick with the driving flakes, when, as a consequence (as I learned later) of a drift being piled right up against the cable where the latter crossed a jutting ledge, the steady “tug-tug” of the pulling wire ceased and my basket came to a quivering standstill. I knew that I had been approaching the halfway point, but the first evidence I had that the “down basket” had stopped near by was a sudden pulsing blast which cut athwart the besom of the storm and assailed my ears like the crack o’ doom. Except that it was ten times louder than any human being could make, it was just such a wail of agony as would be wrung from the throat of a man who was being stretched on the rack.