Mt. Blanc was first ascended in 1786; then in 1787; again in 1825. Since then the trip has been made several times, two ladies, even, having gone to the very summit. The guides and souvenir dealers in Chamonix are full of stories of the dangers incurred in making the trip. They say that some forty or fifty years ago a couple of guides made a misstep, and were hurled down a chasm. An attempt was made to recover the bodies but without success. They were never found as a whole. Some thirty or forty years afterward, portions of their clothing, with a few bones, were found in a glacier, having been gradually worked from the place they were killed, by the slow but continual motion of the ice. They didn't show us the shoes nor the bones, so we did not feel obliged to believe the story. Accidents! There have been enough of them to deter any sane man or woman from attempting the perilous ascent. The scientists who ascend these dizzy heights, which a goat hardly dares essay, may be excused, for the real scientist is bound by his profession to risk his life any time to establish or demolish [Illustration: THE FATE OF TWO ENGLISHMEN.] [Sidenote: THE MER DE GLACE.] a theory, but there can be no excuse for the mere sight seer to attempt it. Some years ago four English clergymen attempted the ascent. When near the top, toiling up a precipice of ice, the rope to which they were attached broke, and two of them slid down the smooth descent to a precipice, and plunged into a chasm thousands upon thousands of feet deep, and were never more seen. In these ascents every care must be used, for every step is only one step from death. A fall of three thousand feet may be an easy way to die, provided one wants to die, but people are not, as a rule, anxious for so sudden a parting with things sublunary. Imagine the feelings of a man in the instant after the rope breaks and he feels himself nearing the chasm, with nothing on earth to save him! [Illustration: A FREQUENT ACCIDENT.] It is now a well established fact that these immense glaciers, between ten and twenty miles long, and from one to three miles wide, and oftentimes five hundred feet thick, are continually moving, though of course very slowly, averaging from one hundred to as high as five hundred feet per annum. The Mer de Glace, near Chamonix, which is twelve miles long and nearly a mile wide, is said to have moved a foot a day during the past year. This glacier, the Mer de Glace, is one of the most beautiful of the four hundred that are to be found in the Alps near Mt. Blanc. De Saussure, the Genevese naturalist, speaking of its surface, said that it "resembles a sea suddenly frozen, not during a tempest, but when the wind has subsided, and the waves, although still high, have become blunted and rounded. These great waves are intersected by transverse crevasses, the interior of which appears blue, while the ice is white on the surface."