when a rock falls, it was none the less awful to behold. We saw the mountain slide bodily forward, and the one thought must have flashed into all our minds at once, "If this rock on which we stand is not a rib of the hill, but is simply imbedded in that mud mountain, we are lost." That of course could scarcely be, but nevertheless we all turned and fled along the ridge, horses and men, and, as we looked over our shoulders, there was the farther spur of rock, which had attracted the three prospectors, slipping forward and down, whelmed in the slide. The rest was too sudden to describe rightly. A great crashing of trees and a rumbling, now of rocks, came up from the lower valley, and the mountain absolutely subsided in the centre and went slithering down. We posted along the face of the hill here to the south, I think each of us expecting any moment to feel the ground fail under him. But at last we gained the hard, rocky summit of a ridge that ran edgewise into that black mountain. There we paused and looked back. There was now a dip in the ridge, where before had been an eminence; and farther along, where a new precipice had been made by this fall, we saw (where the rain drove) huge pieces of earth loosen and fall, one after the other, upon the blackness below. But these droppings were just as the last shots after a battle, and might keep on a long while, sometimes greater, sometimes less, but never anything to compare with the first fall. But we could not remain there. A fresh bending over of the tree-tops, like fishing-rods when the trout runs, a fresh flurry of wind, and a sudden assault of hail sent us from that storm-fronting height to seek shelter below. One would have thought that there could be no dry inch of ground in all the world; the hills were spouting foaming torrents, and in our flight, as we passed the place up which Canlan and I had come, I saw the watercourse no longer dry, but a turbulent rush of waters. It was farther along the hill, so anxious were we to pass beyond the possibility of any further crumbling, that we made a descent. Our faces were bruised with the hail and we were stiff with cold, when at last we came to what you might call an islet in the storm. The hill itself, quite apart from its watercourses, was all a-trickle and a-whisper with water, but here was a little rise where the water went draining around on either side, and in the centre of the rise a monster fir-tree, the lowest branches about a dozen feet from the ground which all around the tree was dust-dry, so thick were the branches overhead. Under this natural roof we sheltered; here we built our fire, dried ourselves, and cooked and ate the meal of which we stood so greatly in need; and after that we sat and hearkened, with a subdued gladness and a kind of peaceful excitement in our breasts, to the voices of the storm—the trailing of the rain, the cry of the wind, and the falling of trees.