There are few sights in Nature which more powerfully impress the mind than a sunset among the mountains. General Sir Richard Strachey concludes his description of the Himalayas with the following striking passage: "Here may the eye, as it sweeps along the horizon, embrace a line of snowclad mountains such as exist in no other part of the world, stretching over one third of the entire circle, at a distance of forty or fifty miles, their peaks towering over a sea of intervening ranges piled one behind another, whose extent on either hand is lost in the remote distance, and of which the nearest rises from a gulf far down beneath the spectator's feet, where may be seen the silver line that marks a river's course, or crimson fields of amaranth and the dwellings of man. Sole representative of animal life, some great eagle floats high overhead in the pure dark-blue sky, or, unused to man, fearlessly sweeps down within a few yards to gaze at the stranger who intrudes among these solitudes of Nature. As the sun sinks, the cold grey shadow of the summit where we stand is thrown forward, slowly stealing over the distant hills, and veiling their glowing purples as it goes, carries the night up to the feet of the great snowy peaks, which still rise radiant in the rosy light above the now darkening world. From east to west in succession the splendour fades away from one point after another, and the vast shadow of the earth is rapidly drawn across the whole vault of heaven. One more departing day is added to the countless series which has silently witnessed the deathlike change that passes over the eternal snows, as they are left raising their cold pale fronts against the now leaden sky; till slowly with the deepening night the world of mountains rises again, as it were, to a new life, under the changed light of the thousand stars which stud the firmament and shine with a brilliancy unknown except in the clear rarefied air of these sublime heights." Year by year a larger number of busy workers from our great towns, availing themselves of the increased facilities for travel, come to the mountains to spend their summer holidays,--some to the Swiss Alps, others to Wales, Cumberland, Norway, or the Highlands of Scotland. There are few untrodden valleys in these regions, few of the more important mountains which have not been climbed.