And then the setting of it all. The exceeding beauty and strangeness of the snow-clad earth, spotless and radiant, like a bride adorned for her husband, and the enchanting details that surround us, wander where we will. On every side cold and heat, wind and moisture, play fantastic tricks before high heaven, stereotyping cascades on the precipices, casing in crystal the swirls and falls of streamlets, draping cliffs and caves with iridescent fringe and lacework of ice. Snow decorates the sombre towers of pine and fir as with jewelled fleece, and bows to an added grace the pliant larch-limbs on which remnants of autumn foliage still linger in brushes of tawny gold; hoar-frost weaves fairy-like embroidery over twigs and leaves; shadows chequer the stainless ground with exquisite pencilling; all the familiar objects of wayside, croft and fell suffer a winter change into something rich and strange. He who would see all this at its best and at his ease must take to skis, for the gift of which the Alps owe an incalculable debt to Norway. The introduction is comparatively recent, but the alacrity with {60} which it has been taken up shows how thoroughly it met a want. Detachments of the Swiss army are exercised on skis every winter, and the citizen soldiers have taken the accomplishment back to their mountain homes, where it has been eagerly adopted. Children may be seen on home-made skis trooping to the often distant school, or having the time of their lives on slopes and plateaux. Those who do not cultivate it as a spectacular sport may welcome ski-ing as a means of locomotion, enabling them to go to places otherwise inaccessible, to pass swiftly and lightly over snow in which unskied bipeds would flounder up to the knees, if not over the head. What matters it to the humble novice that his course seem but shambling and shuffling to the winner of cups and breaker of records. What is that to him as he brushes over the sparkling slopes and threads the cloistral hills? He will find himself on shining plateaux bathed in hazy light and walled in the shimmering distance with ethereal ramparts. He will pass into solemn depths of forest where the winding way is edged and arched with pines that stretch on either hand into illimitable aisles. Sometimes his path will lead him to a radiant sanctuary where Nature seems taking her winter rest in undisturbed repose; no breath of wind breaks the stillness, nor note of bird, nor human footfall; the earth as he ascends is transfigured with new and strange magnificence, the heaven deepens to a diviner blue and the shadows to {61} more mystic purple, the peaks close round and rise cathedral-like on every side: a cathedral vast and soaring, vaulted with unfathomable sky, piled and pinnacled, sculptured and wrought, beyond any architect's imagining, and clothed with light as with a garment. {62} INDEX