The Alp-spirit seemed to be amusing himself mightily with this same mist! at one moment, catching it up in huge masses, he piled it on the sharp peaks, as if to make himself a comfortable cushion; and then, sitting suddenly down to try its efficacy, drove it in all directions by his "lubber weight." Enraged, he tossed and tumbled it about for some time, and at last spread it into one broad level plain, with the higher peaks standing out clear and sharp, like rocks from a calm sea. Now and then the mist would disappear entirely for a few moments, leaving everything clear and bright; then a small cloud, "like a man's hand," would form on the side of some distant peak, and spreading out with inconceivable rapidity, would envelope us in its boiling wreaths, while the wind, ever and anon rushing down some unexpected gully, cut a tunnel right through it, giving us glimpses of distant mountains and snow-fields, looking near and strange as if seen through a telescope. At last the sun began to shine out cheerily and steadily, and the breeze gave a freshness and buoyance to our spirits never to be felt except on high mountains. The heavy atmosphere of the valley squeezes one's soul into its case, and sits on the lid like an incubus. That blessed mountain-spirit is the only power who takes the lid off altogether, and lets the soul out of its larva-case to revel in the strange beauties of his domain without restraint! After a time, we found ourselves in a region of snow-fields, filling up broad valleys, lying calm and shadowless in the bright sunshine. Here and there, they were marked by delicate blue lines, where the crevasses allowed the substratum of ice to be seen, showing that these apparently eternal and immovable plains of snow were slowly but steadily flowing downwards, to appear as splintered glaciers in the valley far below; and here and there again, dark ridges, standing sharply up from the snow-bed, marked the course of buried mountain ranges, and gave some idea of the vast depth of the deposit. But wonderfully beautiful as these plains were, and strange and wild as they appeared to an English eye, with a brilliant August sun pouring his whole flood of light and warmth upon them, they were not the great points of interest to us. Those mighty ranges of cliff, rising tier above tier to our right, fretted with a pure white lace-work of fresh fallen snow, with here and there vast beds of screes shot from above, giving promise of gemsenkraut, were the bits we scanned with the greatest eagerness. We had come for chamois, and I am afraid, looked upon the rest as of very secondary importance.