us to Great End so long as it pleased them to amuse themselves down there on the leeside of the mountain. We quickly demolished our own share of the provisions, and with an unselfishness rarely present in the great latterday mountaineering expeditions, decided to leave them a few sandwiches and to cloy the hungry edge of our remaining appetites with tobacco. We were not all smokers, but everybody present assisted in lighting the first pipe, such a labour was it to keep a match burning. We waited there in a close bundle until our feet were half frozen and our faces stiff with icicles. Then we became rather nervous about our missing friends, and debated whether they meant to reach the top that day, or whether they had turned their backs to the lunch and made for Sprinkling Tarn. The latter course seemed at once the most expedient for them and the most convenient for us, and gladly we acted on this assumption. It was just as well we did so, for the frost had sharply nipped some of us, and it was long before my heels gave me any sensation but that of a pair of snowballs in my boots. We slung round the Esk Hause, and had some fine glissading to the hollow of the hill below the crags. When well opposite our climb at the point whence we had started some five hours earlier, our united shouting brought back an answering call from the gully. Soon we could see the burly form of their greatest member slowly descending the crags at about the same spot where we had long before left him. Having distinguished him as a preliminary landmark easy of recognition, the three others were one by one made out. We were relieved to observe that they were all coming down in a normal condition; no broken limb or sprained ankle had occurred to spoil their pleasure and stop their climbing. After a few minutes’ waiting we learnt their story. The left-hand route had begun in a vertical ice-sheet twenty feet high that took them two hours to surmount. Then, when with sighs of relief, or hyperbolic language, or eloquent silence, that marked each individual’s satisfaction at the happy completion of a difficult pitch, they had cut their way over the edge of this wall and rounded the traverse that dominated it, they were aghast to meet a wall of ice in every respect similar to the first, but magnified! This was heart-breaking, but they made a bold bid for success, and started afresh on the new task. But the daylight was already within an hour of vanishing, and a night on those rocks would have been too much for even the sturdiest of them.