Whether she spent the night on our faces, in alternate watches, I know not, but I had ghastly dreams, and when I woke in the morning, I found my hand and arm thrust forth from the hay, reposing on a cool and clean counterpane of snow, which had drifted in during the night, as if I had been repelling her advances even in my sleep. Feeling very cold and damp, we turned out as soon as we woke, and blowing up the embers of the fire, warmed ourselves as well as we could, and took a peep out into the night. The storm had passed away, leaving everything covered with a veil of snow, that gleamed faintly under the intense black-blue sky. The stars were beginning to assume that peculiar sleepy, twinkling appearance which shows that their night-watch is drawing to a close, and everything lay in still, calm rest around us. We breakfasted sparingly, as our provisions were beginning to run short, thanks to the keen mountain air and our hard work the day before, and just as the first cold chill of the approaching dawn began to be felt, we left the cabin, shutting up Catchins, and hanging the marmot on a peg out of her reach, till our return. Our day's route lay more round to the left of the Wildgrad Kögle. The scene was for some time a repetition of that of the day before, but the cliffs were still more precipitous and the ravines narrower and more difficult to traverse. Many a tumble we got for the first hour amongst the boulders covered with treacherous moss and cowberry plants, but before sunrise we had left all vegetation behind us again, and were up amongst the crags and the snow. As we ascended, we saw a valley to our left, filled to the brim with dense mist, which, as soon as the sun began to tinge the highest peaks, rose in swirling columns, and shut out every thing that was not in our immediate vicinity. This was advantageous, as, although it prevented our _seeing_, it at the same time prevented our being _seen_, from the cliffs before we reached our best ground. We toiled on steadily, crossing vast beds of snow, and occasionally the roots of some glacier, that threw itself into the valleys to our left, climbing, scrambling, and slipping, but still steadily ascending, till we got to where Joseph expected to fall in with chamois, when we called a halt, and sheltering ourselves behind a mass of rock from the keen morning wind, waited for the clearing of the mist.