He tied a loop on to one end of his spare rope, large enough for a foot to be comfortably slipped therein, and flung that end down to Hill. I operated with the other rope, sending an end down for Hill to tie round his waist in the usual manner. The object of the process was to get the third man up with the least expenditure of energy on our part; in fact, to make Hill do all his own lifting. The wall was not so complicated in design as to render it impossible to haul him straight up like a bale of goods. But neither he nor I had till then seen an application of the stirrup-rope, and we had come out to be educated. There are many places where the method is well worth employing. The operations commenced by Hill’s fixing a foot in the stirrup and lifting it a couple of feet as Robinson hauled up his rope. Then, with Robinson simply holding on firmly, Hill straightened himself on the stirrup, using it as a foothold, while I pulled up the couple of feet of slack in the waist-rope. Next it was my turn to hold hard as Hill raised his stirrup foot, and then Robinson’s to keep the foot firm while Hill lifted himself on to it. These two moves were repeated again and again alternately. All through the process the ropes were held as free from slack as possible, any upward movement of Hill’s engaged foot or body being responded to promptly by Robinson or myself respectively. It will be perceived, if the description is as clear as I want it to be, that all the actual lifting of Hill’s weight he managed himself during the straightening-out on the stirrup, and that we others were at most called upon to hold only his weight. Even this much stress on our hands we could avoid by partial belaying, though in that particular spot there were no entirely suitable projecting rocks that could be utilized as belaying-pins. Bit by bit Hill worked up the wall, till at last his head and shoulders appeared over the rounded coping at our feet, and he scrambled on to the scree. Then we all sat down and Robinson told us tales about that particular locality. Among others he gave us one to emphasize the practical lesson we had just been having on the use of the stirrup-rope. A famous climber, indeed he was sometime president of the Alpine Club, and in a vague, traditional sort of way years before he had fallen some hundreds of feet down a vertical gully hard by, without coming to any harm except that of finding his name ever afterwards associated with the gully; well, this famous climber was coming up that same wall by means of the stirrup-rope, and the zealous operatives above more than responded to his slightest movements. He lifted his foot a few inches, they hauled up the stirrup-rope a few yards, and anticipating that he might find the alternations a little laborious, proceeded to pull him up by sheer strength of goodwill. Thus his attached foot appeared first over the edge, and the remainder of his person followed in some confusion. So, at any rate, the story went.